(Photo by Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images)
A staffer at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent personally identifiable information to another agency in an insecure format.
As Bloomberg reports, Marko Elez emailed a spreadsheet with names, transaction types, and amounts of money to two people at the US General Services Administration (GSA).
According to David Ambrose, chief privacy officer for the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), the information is "low risk" because it doesn't include information like Social Security numbers of birth dates.
However, "Elez’s distribution of this spreadsheet was contrary to BFS policies, in that it was not sent encrypted, and he did not obtain prior approval of the transmission via a 'Form 7005,' describing what will be sent and what safeguards the sender will implement to protect the information," Ambrose wrote in a Friday court filing.
You may remember Elez as the former SpaceX and X engineer who was hired as a DOGE staffer in January. Weeks later, he resigned when The Wall Street Journal unearthed racist tweets he'd posted the year before. But following an intervention from Vice President JD Vance—"I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life," Vance tweeted about Elez, who is in his mid-20s—Elez was rehired. Musk and President Trump also backed the move.
The improperly emailed file was discovered after Elez resigned in early February. "Bureau security personnel [then] performed a forensic analysis on Elez’s email account and issued laptop," according to Ambrose.
Notably, the audit found that "Elez did not make any alterations or changes to Bureau payment systems." But it did find the emails to the GSA. Elez should have known better, according to Ambrose, who said he briefed Elez on BFS rules that ban "data and equipment [from being] sent outside the Bureau without formal approval."
All of this is coming to light because of a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James and 13 other Democratic state AGs, who are trying to stop DOGE from accessing data at the US Treasury Department. In early February, a federal judge restricted DOGE's access to the system, but as Bloomberg reports, the judge said the Justice Department could get that injunction lifted if they outlined how DOGE employees were being vetted and trained. So, that's why Ambrose submitted his letter to the court.