Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk’s DOGE unit is pushing untested code directly into the Treasury’s payment infrastructure — a system that handles over $6 trillion in federal payments annually [based on Wired and Talking Points Memo reporting].
And Elez’s qualifications for this extraordinary level of access to our nation’s financial infrastructure? According to Wired’s reporting, a mere three and a half years of experience since graduating Rutgers, split between SpaceX and ExTwitter’s Search AI team. Neither position involved anything remotely close to handling critical financial infrastructure or government payment systems.
Lambert here: Again, so Elez installs a backdoor in COBOL? Fine, but how? (I can grant that Elez has extraordinary engineering skills, but as the case of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, those skills might be in social engineering.
Let’s be clear about what we’re seeing: deliberately obscured payment-blocking capabilities being added to absolutely critical government infrastructure by an inexperienced developer with minimal oversight. In cybersecurity terms, that’s not just a backdoor — it’s flashing warning lights of an approaching catastrophe.
All of this becomes even more alarming when you consider the broader context: sophisticated foreign adversaries have been systematically probing and compromising US government systems for years.
Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, nothing goes wrong at all. It sounds like career staff are doing their best to actually protect the system from harm. But, this isn’t a rocket ship that you can have blow up a few times before you figure out the problems.
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