The Clown Show

Image by Reddit

DOGE, aka The Clown Show, keeps on giving in terms of Musk's hiring people cosmically unqualified, not only in terms of security clearances and government wherewithal but also with ethics and the desire to create havoc as needs warrant.

A teenage member of billionaire Elon Musk's DOGE boys — a youthful entourage currently slicing its way through the federal government — was previously fired from an internship after being accused of leaking sensitive data to a competitor.

The 19-year-old high school grad Edward Coristine, also known by the online moniker "Big Balls," was "terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors," according to a June 2022 message reviewed by Bloomberg.

It's yet another sign that Musk did practically zero vetting while building out his A-team of young men who are now plundering a growing number of government agencies.

And this.

One of Elon Musk's lackeys at his DOGE group, Marko Elez, unexpectedly resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal revealed a litany of extremely racist social media posts he'd apparently made shortly before joining the team.

The exact reason for his abrupt departure remains unclear. However, as Wired reports, White House officials seem to have provided incorrect information about Elez only being given "read-only" permissions to the US Treasury codebase, hinting at the possibility that he could have been in trouble for things other than the egregiously racist posts linked to his departure.

According to Wired, Elez did in fact have write access, allowing him to push unvetted and untested changes straight to the Treasury's payments system — a nightmare scenario that could introduce all sorts of cybersecurity vulnerabilities and leave doors open for adversary hacker groups.

The Musk-led effort to gain entry into Treasury’s huge payment database
drew a lawsuit Monday. | Jose Luis Magana/AP

Elon Musk’s headlong rush to take control of crucial federal agencies and functions — and to dismantle some of them virtually overnight — has stoked widespread alarm in Washington about the aims of his Donald Trump-backed mission.

His so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s early moves have violated the Privacy Act and cybersecurity laws, according to legal experts, and triggered a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s assault on government bureaucracy.

Legal and security experts are particularly exercised by Musk’s move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and take control of the Treasury Department’s central payments database.

“The scale here is unprecedented in terms of the risk to sensitive personal and financial information,” said Alan Butler of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”