U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the crowd as U.S. Vice President JD Vance looks on in the VIP overflow viewing area in Emancipation Hall after his inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th President of the United States.
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Elon Musk said Friday he will rehire a DOGE staffer who resigned from a Treasury Department post after the exposure of his tweets advocating for racism and eugenics.
Musk’s announcement on his social media platform X came after Vice President JD Vance urged Musk to hire the staffer back and President Donald Trump endorsed the view.
“He will be brought back,” Musk, the head of DOGE, wrote on X in response to Vance’s recommendation.
“To err is human, to forgive divine,” Musk wrote.
Less than an hour earlier, Trump was asked about the posts by the 25-year-old former staffer, Marko Elez, and Vance’s opinion that he should be brought back to DOGE.
“Well, I don’t know about the particular thing,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.
“But if the vice president said that — did you say that? — I’m with the vice president,” Trump said.
Elez resigned Thursday, after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about Elez’s connection to an X account that made the inflammatory tweets.
On Friday morning, Musk launched a poll on X asking users whether Elez should be rehired to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency team.
Vance replied to that poll, saying that Elez should rejoin DOGE.
“Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote on X.
“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” said Vance.
“So I say bring him back,” the vice president wrote. “If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Later Friday, Vance defended his view in a bitter exchange with Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., over one of the posts from an account linked to Elez.
“Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire?” Khanna, who is Indian American, asked Vance on X. “Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
Vance, whose wife is also Indian American, shot back that Khanna should “grow up.”
“Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children,” Vance wrote.
Vance added in another post, “You disgust me.”
Elez was one of a group of young adults on DOGE, which has been tasked by Trump with cutting federal spending and reducing the U.S. government workforce.
Trump has purged Democratic commissioners of the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since taking office, as well as Department of Justice and FBI staff.
The account linked to Elez tweeted in September, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
The same month, the account tweeted ″’Normalize Indian hate,’ referring to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley,” the Journal reported.
Those posts came after Vance had been nominated as Trump’s running mate.
Vance is married to Usha Vance, who is the first Indian American and first Hindu to be second lady of the United States. Vance is of Scots-Irish descent.
Last summer, the same account tweeted, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” Weeks before that, it posted: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, on Friday morning launched an X poll with the question: “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?”
The poll, which ended around 11:15 a.m., drew more than 385,000 votes.
Of those votes, 78% said that Elez should be brought back, while 22% voted no on that question.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk takes his seat at the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. President in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
On Thursday, before he quit, Elez and another DOGE staffer who were designated as special government employees were approved by a federal judge to have access to the payment system of the U.S. Treasury. The judge restricted their ability to share data from that highly sensitive system with other people.
Elez previously worked for X and another Musk company, SpaceX.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Bloomberg news service Thursday that he personally had vetted one of the two Treasury employees from Musk’s DOGE team. It was not clear if that person was Elez, who resigned after Bessent gave his interview.
“These are highly trained professionals,” Bessent told Bloomberg. “This is not some roving band running around doing things.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an interview Friday with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, spoke about DOGE employees being deployed to his department.
“The government is old and maybe a little bit stodgy,” Wright said. “We’ve got some young kids, think young gun management consultants, coming in to take a critical look at how things are run.”
“I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” Wright said. “They don’t have security clearances.”
CNN previously reported that a DOGE staffer was given access to the Energy Department’s IT system.
— CNBC’s Spencer Kimball and contributed to this article.