A key staff member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency resigned earlier today after he was linked by the Wall Street Journal to a profile on X that had made a number of racist posts, advocating for eugenics and the destruction of Israel and Gaza.

The DOGE staffer has been identified as Marko Elez, and earlier in the day he had controversially been given approval by a federal judge to access the U.S. Treasury’s payments database, along with a second employee working for Musk (pictured). While the judge did give him access, he restricted his ability to share data held within the system.

Shortly afterwards, the Journal published an exclusive report linking 25-year-old Elez with an account on Musk’s social media platform X, which had been deleted in December.

According to the Journal’s report, Elez controlled an account going by the @nullllptr handle, which had been renamed from @marko_elez. It discovered this after looking at archived posts on the network.

“The user behind the @nullllptr also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink, where Elez has worked, according to archives of Elez’s personal website,” the Journal noted.

Musk has been tasked by U.S. President Donald Trump with finding ways to slash the federal government’s spending by cutting out unnecessary programs and reducing its employee headcount. Elez was a key member of the DOGE team, and had been designated as a “special government employee.”

Yet despite being given such an important task and access to highly secret government records, he was also extremely racist, at least going by the opinions expressed by his alter ego @nullllptr.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” @nullllptr said in a September post, the Journal reported.

Later that month, the same account expressed the view that we should “normalize Indian hate,” in response to a post about the large numbers of Indian people working in Silicon Valley.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” @nullllptr posted in July.

Going back further, to June, the same account said: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

Given his status as one of the few DOGE team members with administrator-level privileges, it may well be that Elez was instrumental in the controversial efforts to root out so-called DEI or diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government. DOGE’s staff has worked to identify numerous employees working on such programs in order to put them on “temporary leave” while it works out how to cancel them.

After the Journal brought the account to the attention of White House officials, Elez promptly resigned from his position at DOGE, said spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.

The incident could prove to be a source of embarrassment for Trump’s new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who told Bloomberg in an interview posted earlier today that he had “personally vetted” one of the two Treasury employees from Musk’s team.

It’s not clear if he was referring to Elez or someone else, but Bessent insisted that the DOGE team members are “highly trained professionals.” He added that “this is not some roving band running around doing things.”

Image: tldv.io