Department of Government Efficiency

On November 12, 2024, Trump announced his intention to found the Commission called "Department of Government Efficiency" under the direction of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Commission is to save over $ 500 billion in annual public expenses by the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence on July 4, 2026. This should be achieved by deregulation, reduction of the federal administration and savings.

Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) is not a ministry (Executive Department), but a presidential commission (Presidential Advisory Commission), i.e. an advisory commission outside the government.

A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to systems of the Ministry of Finance who are responsible for almost all payments by the US government, say three sources.
Two of these sources say that Elez privileges include the possibility of writing code on two most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and the Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS).

Typically, these admin privileges could give someone the opportunity to log in via safe Shell access to servers, to navigate the entire file system, change user rights and to delete or change critical files. This could enable someone to avoid security measures and possibly cause irreversible changes to exactly the systems to which they have access.

At the beginning of April 2025, NLRB employee Daniel Berulis made public that employees of the Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the National Labor Relations Board a month earlier and brought personal data. He explained that in the course of this process, security systems that unauthorized end devices have in the meantime refused access to sensitive data and were destroyed after the data. During the detection of the data, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency left them unprotected, so that they were temporarily open to the public.

Daniel Berulis, an employee of the National Labor Relations Board, made it public at the beginning of April 2025 that security systems that have refused to access sensitive data that unauthorized devices have in the meantime were switched off; Data-including contact information from lawyers-could be tapped through temporary root accounts and then the traces were destroyed.

During the waste of the data, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency left them unprotected, so that they were temporarily open to the public. Berulis noticed days before the authority gained access to the NLRB that Jordan Wick, who was employed, was working on a backdoor software [49]; Wick added several tools to the source code that apparently related to his work at the Department of Government Efficiency.

Daniel Berulisdes National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), noticed days before the Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the NLRB that the Doge employee Jordan Wick was working on backdoor software; Wick added several tools to the source code that apparently related to his work at the Department of Government Efficiency.