Government efficiency chief Elon Musk announced Friday that he will rehire one of his DOGE workers after he was cancelled over allegedly racist social media posts.
“He will be brought back,” Musk posted on X Friday afternoon. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Marko Elez, 25, resigned from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force Thursday, after the Wall Street Journal published a hit piece—written by a former USAID contractor— exposing the now-deleted posts.
“Normalize Indian hate,” an X account associated with Elez reportedly posted in September, in an apparent joke targeting people of Indian ethnicity working in the U.S. tech sector.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account also posted on X, according to the Journal.
The exposé, written by former USAID worker Katherine Long, came after six of Musk’s DOGE wiz kids were doxxed in a Wired article portraying them as too young and inexperienced to help Musk reform the government. Threats on social media soon followed and Edward Martin, President Trump’s interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia vowed to get to the bottom of it.
Musk posted a poll on his X platform Friday morning asking users whether he should rehire Elez: “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” the tech billionaire wrote Friday morning, attaching a poll asking users to answer “Yes” or “No.”
The final result of the poll, with 385,247 votes, showed 78 percent of users answered yes, and 22 percent voted no.
Vice President JD Vance said in an X post late Friday morning that while he “obviously” disagrees with some of Elez’s posts, “ I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.”
“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” Vance added.
“So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
City Journal’s Christopher Rufo agreed with the vice president, asserting on X that “the Left has defined the terms of social annihilation for the past decade.”
Vice President @JDVance has the opportunity to shift the calculus and end the era of doxxing, smears, and cancelation. The Right does not have to delegate social authority to malicious left-wing journalists.
Without knowing the particulars of the case, President Trump told reporters at the White House today that he supported the vice president’s take.
“One of the DOGE engineers was fired for inappropriate posts. The Vice President says bring him back. What do you say?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked Trump during the president’s joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.
“Well I don’t know about that particular thing, but if the Vice President said so,” Trump replied, turning to Vance. “Did you say that? I’m with the VP.”
Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and tech entrepreneur, also recommended that Elez be rehired.
“If possible, Marko Elez (@marko_elez) should be reinstated at DOGE. If that is not possible, we should fund him to do his own startup,” Srinivasan wrote on X.
Let me explain my logic.
1) First, there can be no negotiation with terrorists — or journalists. Giving a single inch to a journo on anything DOGE-related would be like firing Michael Flynn at the beginning of Trump’s first term. Nothing should be done in response to anything they write.
2) Second, the entire practice of digging through people’s old posts to find some negative remark should be deprecated. Some out-of-context remarks almost never represent the whole human being.
3) Third, to my Indian-origin followers — apparently Marko made some anti-Indian comments. Of course, I don’t love that. But he’s only 25, will mature in time, and is clearly very competent. I believe in capitalism and dialogue as a way to bridge this kind of divide. Not summary cancellation.
TLDR: if possible, Elon should consider restoring Marko to DOGE.
Katherine Long, who previously wrote for the Seattle Times, Vox Media and Business Insider, was only recently hired by the WSJ.
“It looks like she was hired solely to go after the DOGE team,” noted X user Aesthetica.
She reportedly has a history of doxxing people like Raw Egg Nationalist.
Before working in journalism, Long worked seven month stints at the State Department (in 2014) and for USAID (in 2016), FFO Freedom’s Mike Benz reported on X.
“That’s incredible. The journo who doxxed the DOGE staffer worked at 3 of the Top 4 Blobcraft Agencies I stress in lectures do organized political warfare as intelligence work: USAID, State, and DOD’s Political-Military branch,” Benz wrote. “Literally the only resume point missing is CIA.”
While working for USAID, she managed projects in Central Asia, according to her Seattle Times profile.
Bill Ackman, billionaire hedge fund manager and founder and chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management, denounced Long on X.
“She is an evil, unethical liar. I have personal experience with her,” he wrote.
Musk posted similar sentiments, saying, “She’s a disgusting and cruel person” in response to a post tying her to the organized campaign for wokeness and diversity in video games.
Since President Trump assumed office, Musk and his DOGE team have disrupted the deep state with an aggressive campaign targeting its funding mechanisms.
An insider on Substack detailed the work that began in the wee hours of the morning at the Treasury Dept. on January 21 to enact Trump’s “revolution rewiring America’s power.”
While career bureaucrats prepared orientation packets and welcome memos, DOGE’s team was already deep inside the payment systems. No committees. No approvals. No red tape. Just four coders with unprecedented access and algorithms ready to run.
“The beautiful thing about payment systems,” noted a transition official watching their screens, “is that they don’t lie. You can spin policy all day long, but money leaves a trail.”
That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.
By 6 AM, Treasury’s career officials began arriving for work. They found systems they thought impenetrable already mapped. Networks they believed hidden already exposed. Power structures built over decades revealed in hours.
Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.
Trump immediately issued a federal government hiring freeze, and offered thousands of workers deferred resignation packages.
And thanks to the DOGE team’s work, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reportedly slashed USAID’s workforce from more than 10,000 employees to fewer than 300.
