Musk says DOGE staffer who resigned following racist social media posts will be back

 

White House

Musk says DOGE staffer who resigned following racist social media posts will be back

 

Both Trump and Vance said earlier in the day the staffer should return.

 

By Danny Nguyen

02/07/2025 05:10 PM EST

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/doge-staffer-racist-post-elon-musk-014416

 

Elon Musk said Friday he would bring back a DOGE staffer who resigned after he was linked to racist online comments.

 

“To err is human, to forgive divine,” Musk wrote on X. The post was a reply to Vice President JD Vance, who said he “obviously disagree[d] with some of [the staffer’s] posts,” but did not think “stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.”

 

 

“I’m with the vice president,” Trump said in a press conference Friday.

 

 

Marko Elez resigned Thursday after a Wall Street Journal probe connected the Department of Government Efficiency lieutenant to a deleted social media account on X, the White House told the Journal.

 

The account, at one point named @nullllptr and @marko_elez, identified themselves as a former employee at Starlink and SpaceX, the Journal reported. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” read a September post from the account, according to the Journal’s review.

 

“Just for the record,” the since-deleted account reportedly wrote in a July post, “I was racist before it was cool.”

 

Musk posted a poll on X Friday morning asking users whether he should bring back Elez. The poll collected over 385,000 votes, about 78 percent of which favored bringing Elez back.

 

The announcement comes as Musk’s DOGE aims to slash the federal government’s workforce. In the process, DOGE operatives have obtained access to highly sensitive tools, which has prompted some lawmakers to question whether DOGE has overstepped legal boundaries.

 

Elez, recently appointed as a special government employee in the U.S. Treasury, was one of two DOGE agents who gained access to the agency’s sensitive payment systems, according to Justice Department attorney Bradley Humphreys. The DOGE operatives, though, did not share any of this data with non-Treasury officials to the Department of Justice’s knowledge, Humphreys continued.

 

On Friday afternoon, Rep. Ro Khanna responded to Vance’s post, asking “are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? For the sake of both of our kids?” Vance’s wife, Usha, is Indian.

 

“For the sake of both our kids?” Vance replied. “You disgust me.”