A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer who resigned after being linked to racist social media posts will be brought back after President Trump and Vice President JD Vance both co-signed the idea, Elon Musk said Friday.
“He will be brought back,” Musk, the head of Trump’s cost-slashing initiative, wrote on X.
“To err is human, to forgive divine,” the tech billionaire added.
Musk, 53, announced his decision to rehire 25-year-old engineer Marko Elez after the vice president expressed strong support for giving the ex-DOGE staffer a second chance.
“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 tweeted in response to Musk’s X poll asking users if the DOGE worker should be brought back.
“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” the vice president added. “So I say bring him back.”
“If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Trump, 78, later told reporters that while he wasn’t clued in to the situation, he backed Vance’s call.
“If the vice president said that – did you say that? I’m with the vice president,” the president said.
Elez, who had been posted at the Treasury Department as “special government employees” working with the DOGE team, resigned Thursday after the Wall Street Journal linked him to vile posts made on a since-deleted X account.
Going by the pseudonym @nullllptr, Elez allegedly tweeted support for a “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration and expressed a hatred for people from India.
“Normalize Indian hate,” read an X post from the account linked to Elez, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” read another post from last July reportedly made by the former SpaceX and X engineer.
“I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth,” Elez allegedly tweeted last June.
The outlet linked the X account to Elez after uncovering that it previously went by the handle @marko_elez and that its owner described themselves as a SpaceX employee.
Elez is one of two DOGE staffers working at the Treasury Department who have controversially been granted “read only” access to sensitive records detailing the trillions of dollars in payments the agency processes annually.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
