Elon Musk Reinstates DOGE Staffer Targeted by Former USAID Employee

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DOGE Staffer Resigns After Former USAID Employee Doxes His Old X Account in WSJ Report
A USAID banner hangs from a truck. Photo Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service

Elon Musk said Friday that he would reinstate an employee at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after a Wall Street Journal report featuring a slew of the employee’s social-media posts led to his brief departure.

The exposé, published by The Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Long, featured posts that 25-year-old Marko Elez published in 2024 on a since-deleted X account. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” Elez wrote on the profile in September. He wrote in another post, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”

After an inquiry from Long, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Elez had resigned from his position. He had been responsible for reviewing expenditures at the Treasury Department.

Related: 19-Year-Old Edward Coristine is Quickly Becoming the DOGE Leader Most Feared by Federal Employees

Conservatives widely expressed displeasure with the decision on social media on Thursday night and early Friday, prompting Vice President J.D. Vance to publish a comment on X late Friday morning. “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. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”

Musk responded with a “salute” emoji and wrote, “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”

The WSJ report followed a federal judge’s Wednesday ruling that Elez and another staffer — Tom Krause — could retain “read-only” access to the department’s systems. Three labor unions representing department employees sued in an effort to block the duo, arguing that their ability to access the systems represented a “systematic, continuous, and ongoing violation of federal laws that protect the privacy of personal information contained in federal record.”

Long, the report author, worked for USAID in 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile. That agency’s staffers were placed on leave Friday, and nearly all of the agency’s funding was frozen, after senior leaders refused to allow DOGE staffers access to their systems last weekend. Long noted in a Thursday post on X that her column about Elez was among her first as an employee at WSJ, writing on X, “This is a good time to note that I started at the Wall Street Journal last week!”

Related: BBC Charity Arm Says it Was Decimated by USAID Cuts: 8% of Funding Came from US in 2023-24

It wasn’t clear how Long located the posts on Elez’s account, where he went by the username “@nullllptr.” The account was deleted in December 2024, and was last archived in the Wayback Machine eight months earlier.

X users — including billionaire Bill Ackman — were quick to note Long’s connection to USAID.