DOGE Staffer Who Quit Over Racist Posts Is Already Coming Back to Work

Elon Musk announced Friday that the Department of Government Efficiency employee who quit for a range of racist social media posts will be reinstated.

Musk made a series of social media posts expressing his support for Marko Elez, the DOGE staffer who wrote in September that he couldn’t be paid to “marry outside [his] ethnicity,” and that people should “normalize Indian hate.” Musk also fired off postings attacking the journalist who had brought the racist posts to light, leading Elez to resign.  

“Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” Musk asked in one post on X, attaching a poll where users could vote. 

The vice president of the United States, who is married to an Indian woman and has three children with her, decided to weigh in on the racist boss’s pitch to reinstall the racist employee. Spoiler alert: He thought it was a great idea!

“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote on X. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.”

Crucially, the person in question posted these things in September 2024, and is currently 25 years old. Not exactly a kid. 

“If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that,” Vance wrote, drawing a clear distinction between someone who is racist and someone who is a “bad dude.” Vance has actually been posting on X a lot recently, after he seemingly vanished from all governance the moment he entered the White House. 

Less than an hour later, Donald Trump was asked about Vance’s complicity during a press conference. He replied, “Well, I don’t know about the particular thing, but if the vice president said that—did you say that?—I’m with the vice president!”

Musk took Vance’s approval as marching orders. “He will be brought back,” Musk wrote on X. “To err is human, to forgive divine.” But given all of his support for Elez, it seems that to Musk, there wasn’t much to forgive in the first place. 

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who has been gentle on Musk as the representative of Silicon Valley, responded to Vance’s endorsement with a reminder that the vice president had been personally implicated in the hateful rhetoric of Musk’s employee. 

“Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying “Normalize Indian hate” before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids,” Khanna wrote in a post. 

Vance, who clearly doesn’t believe in the dangers of hate speech, responded with a multipost tirade. 

“For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” he replied. “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”

In a separate post, Vance said he was more concerned that his children would spend their lives afraid to tell stupid jokes “that they later think are wrong or even gross” than face racialized hatred that is forgiven by his own administration. 

(Again, since entering office, he’s had a lot of time to tweet.) 

Khanna wasn’t being whiny; he was raising a real concern. There has been a surge in anti–South Asian hate since January 2023, with threats of violence against Asian Americans increasing by 17 percent. The majority of that hate has been directed at South Asian Americans specifically, according to a report from Stop AAPI Hate. 

Musk’s decision to reinstall his racist employee comes as concerns about DOGE’s sweeping access to sensitive information and startling lack of oversight reached new heights Friday. 

Donald Trump doesn’t care that Elon Musk and his nerd squad have access to the private information of millions of Americans.

During a press conference Friday, Trump was asked about the Department of Government Efficiency’s unfettered access to trillion-dollar payment systems such as the U.S. Treasury Department, as well as the personal information of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and bank account numbers.

“Why does DOGE need all of that?” asked one reporter.

“Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily,” Trump admitted. “I mean, we don’t have very good security in our country, and they get it very easily.”

Trump appeared completely unbothered by the massive intrusion on the privacy of U.S. citizens—in fact, he seemed to suggest it was the fault of government agencies for not better concealing this information from Musk’s goons.

Trump rambled on, describing how DOGE needed to audit certain investments the government had made because they were “obscene, dangerous, bad, very costly.”

Concerns over DOGE’s “insider threat” have only grown in recent days, as they take over agency after agency, acquiring access to more troves of sensitive information. Trump has already said he couldn’t care less about Musk’s conflicts of interest, and the White House said that the DOGE czar would self-determine what projects were appropriate for him to work on.

As DOGE continues to extend its reach, members of Musk’s team are simultaneously being revealed to be a group of twenty-something failsons.

Musk announced Friday that he would be rehiring the DOGE employee who was fired over a range of racist posts because, as he wrote, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” Still, on X, Musk waged war against the journalist who reported on the posts in the first place, so it’s considerably more likely that, to him, there was nothing to forgive.

Additionally, Bloomberg reported Friday that another one of the 19-year-old wards on Musk’s DOGE team had been fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing company secrets with a competitor. Seems like the perfect person to have access to a trove of sensitive information, right?

Shocking: The 19-year old DOGE goon with a questionable résumé who goes by “big balls” online was fired from his last real gig for leaking company information online.

Bloomberg is reporting that Edward Coristine was fired from cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for “leaking internal information to the competitors.” Now Coristine has access to the most sensitive internal information there is, the federal government’s, and he has no confirmed clearance that legitimizes that access.

“I can confirm that Edward Coristine’s brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” a spokesperson for Path Network told Bloomberg on Thursday.

“I had access to every single machine,” Coristine wrote on Discord just weeks after being fired. But he swore he “never exploited it because it’s just not me.” He also posted that he had done “nothing contractually wrong” at Path Network. The comments were made in a Discord channel dedicated to one of Path’s competitor companies.

Several people who knew Coristine said they were confused as to how he ascended to such a consequential position and nervous as to how he’ll handle the enormous responsibility that comes with it, given that he could not handle it at Path Network.

This all comes as DOGE strikes an antagonistic chord with the federal government, taking over government buildings, telling federal employees to stop showing up to work, and locking out elected representatives.

“Your data has been breached. Donald Trump gave unvetted teenagers access to your most private information,” Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell wrote on X. “We are fighting now in the courts. And, shortly, Democrats will use our votes—in government funding bill—to stop this madness and secure your data.”

Musk, DOGE, and Coristine have yet to comment.

The Department of Energy on Friday tried to clarify why one of Elon Musk’s DOGE underlings was granted access to the department’s I.T. systems despite opposition from its general counsel and cybersecurity offices. 

CNN reports that Luke Farritor, 23, whose previous work experience consists of an internship at Musk’s company SpaceX was granted access by Energy Secretary Chris Wright Wednesday. The department’s legal counsel and chief information offices, which govern I.T. and cybersecurity, “said this is a bad idea,” according to a source who spoke with CNN, given that Farritor hadn’t received a standard background check. 

“He’s not cleared to be in DOE, on our systems. None of those things have been done,” said the unnamed source. 

While Farrior was only granted access to basic I.T., including email and Microsoft 365, according to CNN’s sources, the report still rang alarm bells as the agency is in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal, among other aspects of American energy policy and production.

In response to the uproar, Wright sought to discourage speculation that Farrior or anyone else associated with DOGE had access to U.S. nuclear secrets.  

“I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” the energy secretary told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan Friday. 

But Trump administration officials haven’t been honest with the level of access given to Musk’s DOGE cronies. One of his young software engineers, Marko Elez, had administrator privileges with the country’s most vital payment systems governing trillions of dollars in disbursements, allowing critical code to be rewritten, despite Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claiming Elez only had “read-only” access. Elez resigned this week over racist social media posts (but already may be rehired). Meanwhile, a U.S. district court on Thursday limited DOGE’s privileges in government agencies.

Right now, DOGE’s activities are stretching, if not outright breaking, federal law over government functions and positions that are supposed to be governed by Congress. But the only bulwark against Musk and Trump’s overhauling of the federal government is the courts, as federal law enforcement is in the president’s crosshairs.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has decided to play ball with the Trump administration in efforts to stop the Russian invasion.

On Monday, Trump announced that if Zelenskiy wanted to keep getting U.S. military aid, Ukraine would have to fork over some precious rare minerals.

“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earth; we want what we put up to go in terms of a guarantee. We want a guarantee, we’re handing them money hand over fist, we’re giving them equipment, [the European Union is] not keeping up with us,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “We have an ocean in between, they don’t. It’s more important for them than it is for us … so we’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things.”

On Friday, Zelenskiy agreed to Trump’s demands.

“If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” he said, according to Reuters. “The Americans helped the most, and therefore the Americans should earn the most. And they should have this priority, and they will. I would also like to talk about this with President Trump,” Zelenskiy continued, trying to explain that he actually wasn’t just giving Trump access to all the valuable rocks he wanted but instead was offering a joint agreement.

The majority of Ukraine’s mineral deposits—holding metals like titanium and uranium—are now in Russian-controlled territory, as Putin has gained more and more Ukrainian soil as the war has dragged on.

“We need to stop Putin and protect what we have: a very rich Dnipro region, central Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said.

Trump and Zelenskiy are expected to talk sometime next week.