- Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE employee, has resigned after reports linked him to a social media account that shared racist content. Elez was part of a team of young, tech-savvy DOGE workers who have been tearing through government agencies.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer and employee of Elon Musk's DOGE, has resigned from his role, the White House confirmed to multiple news outlets.
Elez's resignation came after a report from the Wall Street Journal linked him to a now-deleted social media account that shared racist content and advocated for eugenics.
According to the outlet's review of archived social media posts, Elez posted on X in July: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
The account also reportedly shared a post calling to normalize "Indian hate," suggested Gaza and Israel be "wiped off the face of the Earth," and said: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity."
The WSJ report said that after it inquired about the account, a White House spokesperson said Elez had resigned from his role. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune about the account. Elez could not be reached for comment.
Before his resignation, the software engineer was working inside the Treasury Department as part of DOGE's efforts to cut costs and root out fraud. Earlier this week, he reportedly gained direct access to the Federal Payments System. According to a Wired report, the 25-year-old had admin privileges over the code that controls sensitive information, including Social Security payments and tax returns.
Elez appears to have another X account which uses the handle @marko_elez. The account has been cleared of all posts, but an archived version of the account reviewed by Fortune shows Elez described himself as an X employee working on AI as well as a former SpaceX employee who worked on flight software.
The account interacted with tweets from Donald Trump and shared multiple posts from Musk, including one that described DOGE as having "some of the world’s best software engineers."
The DOGE team
Elez was part of a team of young, tech-savvy DOGE members who have been tearing through government agencies.
Wired has identified six of them: Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran, who are all between 19 and 25.
Kliger, 25, who worked at AI company Databricks before joining DOGE, has been identified as a key player in DOGE's shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.
According to emails reviewed by Fortune, an email address linked to Kliger was used to instruct USAID workers to work remotely, and later to inform workers they had been placed on admin leave.
Multiple USAID employees, who spoke to Fortune anonymously, said a group of young DOGE workers had entered USAID offices the previous week and asked some workers to justify their jobs.
Most of the agency has since been placed on admin leave, according to a memo reviewed by Fortune.
DOGE staff members have also been spotted at the federal Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Education.
When questioned about the age of some in the DOGE team, Trump said: "That's good, they are very smart though... Some are young, and some are not young. Some are not young at all, but they found great things."
"I haven't seen them," he said. "They work, actually, out of the White House. They're smart people."
