> Overnight Wired reported that contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to ‘read only’ access to department pa

> Overnight Wired reported that contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to ‘read only’ access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25 year old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the US government including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems and has already made extensive changes to the code base for this critical payment system. > Josh, are you a little crestfallen they beat you to it? Well, sure but this is a business is an ocean of ‘arrgghhs’ and honestly the information being out is the big thing. Here are the additional details. > I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin level access on Friday January 31st. The claim of ‘read only’ access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance which they appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible – ‘damage’ in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government. > Phrases like “freaking out” are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago. The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. I want to emphasize that the described changed are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., not live) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. The most recent information I have is that no payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Marko to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. I have also heard no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. They have however looked into extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked. https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219987126 https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219987126