DOGE staffer behind racist posts reinstated at Social Security

Emily Birnbaum, Jake Bleiberg and Dana Hull, Bloomberg News on Feb 20, 2025

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WASHINGTON — The staffer with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who resigned after a report that linked him to racism and eugenics has been reinstated at the Social Security Administration, according to people familiar with the move.

Marko Elez, who reportedly advocated for a “eugenic immigration policy” and argued against mixed-race relationships in posts on X, received support from Musk, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance after his departure earlier this month. Vance argued he didn’t think “stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.”

Before resigning from DOGE, Elez, an engineer who has worked for SpaceX and social-media platform X, had an office in Treasury and an email address with the agency, Bloomberg News previously reported.

Elez did not respond to repeated calls, emails and text messages this week.

He joins other DOGE staffers at the 58,000-employee agency that oversees the nation’s old-age and disability entitlement programs. Its acting commissioner is Leland Dudek, who earlier was removed from his Social Security Administration job for sending information to Musk’s team.

Dudek has said the DOGE team is following the law and has read-only access to the systems, which include information on the nearly 70 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits.

Elez was listed Tuesday on a roster of DOGE employees with a government email address associated with the Executive Office of the President, according to a record seen by Bloomberg News.

Neither the White House nor the Social Security Administration responded to requests for comment.

In his online comments under a pseudonym, Elez within the last year advocated for rolling back the Civil Rights Act, according to a Wall Street Journal report. “Normalize Indian hate,” one post said. “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” another said. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he wrote in a third post.

Elez has since deleted the posts.