In early February, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine was one of two operatives for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) granted potentially wide-ranging access to a number of systems at the Small Business Administration (SBA). Through that foray, DOGE gained access to the National Finance Center (NFC), a sensitive system that provides human resources and payroll functions for the Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), among other agencies.
Coristine is a 19-year-old who was one of DOGE’s earliest hires and was brought on as a permanent government employee at the General Services Administration (GSA) before resigning and then resurfacing as a special government employee at the Social Security Administration. He and Donald Park, a Brazilian jiujitsu enthusiast and private equity investor, have previously been identified as DOGE operatives at the SBA who sought access to HR, contracting, and payment systems and information.
Records reviewed by WIRED show that within five hours of a request from the office of the SBA’s chief information officer that they be given access to SBA systems, Park and Coristine—who went by the online name “Big Balls” and had reportedly been fired from an internship at a network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers, after being suspected of leaking internal information—were granted entrance to the agency’s core financial and loan systems. Not long after that, Coristine had access to NFC systems not even housed within the SBA, the agency to which he had been detailed.
The mechanical process of granting access appears to have started just past noon on February 3, when Stephen Kucharski, the director of the SBA’s Office of Performance Systems Management, an office in the SBA’s Office of Capital Access, emailed 19 colleagues with an urgent request. Two DOGE affiliates, he said, were to be given the digital keys to the agency immediately.
Under the subject line “system access for Edward Coristine” Kucharski wrote, “Please help me and my OCIO colleagues as we mobilize to provide Edward Coristine and Donald Park Admin access to all SBA systems. This action has been cleared and we are on a very short time frame. Doug will be arranging a call to answer questions and I will add Edward to this distribution list as soon as we create his SBA account. His account should be completed very shortly.” The two biggest priorities, he added, were the SBA’s human resources system and its contract system, to include “detailed data on all active procurements.”
Four minutes after sending his initial request, Kucharski followed up to add the SBA’s chief information security officer. At 12:33 pm, Elias Hernandez, the associate administrator for the Office of Veterans Business Development, followed up with a message titled “URGENT REQUEST FROM SBA!” to a smaller group addressed to Michael Jackson, the director of the NFC. (Kucharski, Hernandez, and Jackson did not reply to requests for comment.)
“Please help me get this request to the right NFC leaders who can make this happen ASAP,” Hernandez wrote. “We need the NFC to grant Admin access to the reporting center, insights, and the NFC Mainframe for all SBA Personnel Office Identifiers (POIs) to the following SBA DOGE employees.”
The NFC is an agency nested inside the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that handles payroll for 650,000 government employees—over a fifth of the federal workforce—across more than 170 agencies, including the SBA, according to a source familiar with it who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the press. The information contained in the NFC’s systems includes the Social Security numbers, banking information, addresses, and dates of birth for federal employees, including members of the FBI and DOJ. “We can and have managed the complexities of law enforcement pay for decades,” says the source. (The USDA referred a request for comment from WIRED to the SBA. The SBA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
According to the source familiar with the NFC, requests for access, especially for sensitive systems, normally go through a vetting process. The request is evaluated and, if granted, only permits the lowest level of access required. “We were being told,” they believed, “to give them unlimited access.”
According to emails viewed by WIRED, an IT manager at the NFC requested that Coristine and Park be granted “admin authority” to the mainframe and access to two other applications: Insight, which includes detailed employment records, and the Reporting Center, which includes payroll data. The requests for Insight and the Reporting Center were for “read only” access, meaning that Coristine and Park could see data in the system but not change it. Within roughly three hours of Kucharski’s email, the DOGE operatives had mainframe access, giving them—according to the source—the power to see sensitive information like an employee’s “salary, banking, address, deductions, debt and other vital employment information” at the NFC.
In an email timestamped 4:15 pm, less than an hour after this access was granted, Coristine wrote to Hernandez and the SBA’s deputy chief human capital officer, with another request: “Could you please send me the NFC CIO’s phone number?”
Lambert here: Wowsers
[Coristine was] granted access to records and systems including the Capital Access Financial System, the SBA’s main portal for submitting and servicing loans His access further encompassed several CAFS subsystems that can contain granular information on loans and loan applications.
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