A staffer for Elon Musk’s cost cutting task force violated Treasury Department policy by circulating a spreadsheet with personal information to other people in the Trump administration, according to a court filing by a federal official.
The staff member in question was Marko Elez, who resigned from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last month after he was linked to a social media account promoting eugenics and racism. He was rehired shortly thereafter.
The filing, made by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Chief Security Officer David Ambrose, said Treasury officials performed a forensic analysis of Elez’s laptop and email, concluding he “did not make any alterations or changes to Bureau payment systems.”
However, the examination found that Elez emailed a spreadsheet containing “a name (a person or an entity), a transaction type, and an amount of money” to two United States General Services Administration officials in violation of Fiscal Service Bureau policies.
Elez, he said, failed to send the spreadsheet through encrypted means and did not “obtain prior approval of the transmission,” which would have required him to describe “what will be sent and what safeguards the sender will implement to protect the information.”
Because the names in the spreadsheet Elez sent did not contain “specific identifiers, such as social security numbers or birth dates,” Ambrose said the names in the document are subject to “low risk.”
The forensic analysis was promoted by a lawsuit brought by 19 state attorneys general that is seeking to block DOGE from accessing sensitive payment information on American taxpayers, government employees and contractors.
Elez and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Daily Beast.
In a previous filing, the Treasury claimed Elez was “mistakenly” granted read and write access to department systems in his previous DOGE role before he was rehired. The task force’s access to department systems is currently limited by a temporary restraining order, which the Trump administration has asked the court to amend to give DOGE access to more data.
In a separate filing on Friday, the states suing the Treasury over DOGE’s access wrote that the forensic analysis of Elez’s computer and email account does “nothing to allay any of the concerns expressed by the court in its opinion about the rushed and chaotic nature of the Treasury DOGE Team onboarding process.”
“Rather, these new declarations confirm that the Court’s concerns were well founded.”
