A federal judge temporarily limited members of the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system the day before a DOGE employee who was linked to offensive social media posts quit.
US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the order Wednesday after three union groups — the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union — filed a lawsuit against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, accusing him of illegally sharing their members’ information with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team.
Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, limited access to the payment records system to two DOGE employees — one of whom resigned Thursday — and Treasury officials.
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the two DOGE employees at Treasury could not share or modify the information in the payment records system. APThe judge ordered that the two DOGE workers — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — must be provided “read only” access to payment records as part of their efforts to eliminate waste and fraud and modernizing federal information technology.
Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group Inc., and Elez, an engineer who has worked for Musk at SpaceX and X, were classified as “special government employees” by the judge.
Both have offices at Treasury, agency email addresses and clearance to access unclassified Treasury information, according to Bloomberg News.
The temporary order will prevent DOGE from making any changes to the payment records system or sharing data related to the trillions of dollars in payments the Treasury Department processes annually.
Elez abruptly resigned from DOGE on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal connected him to racist posts made on X.
The 25-year-old engineer reportedly tweeted his support for “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before President Trump’s inauguration and expressed a hatred for people from India.
“Normalize Indian hate,” read an X post from the account linked to Elez, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A DOGE employee who previously worked for Musk at SpaceX resigned Thursday after the Wall Street Journal linked him to racist posts made on X. REUTERS
The union groups sued the Treasury Department over concerns that the agency was illegally sharing the information of its members with DOGE. AFP via Getty ImagesThe outlet linked the X account @nullllptr to Elez after uncovering that it previously went by the handle @marko_elez and described themselves as a SpaceX employee.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” read another post from last July reportedly made by the former DOGE worker.
“I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth,” Elez allegedly tweeted last June.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Wall Street Journal that Elez had resigned from his role after she was asked to comment on the disturbing posts.
