Vance urges Musk to rehire DOGE staffer despite racist tweets

Vice President JD Vance on Friday called for the rehiring of a DOGE staffer who resigned from a sensitive Trump administration post over the exposure of tweets advocating for racism and eugenics.

Vance’s call came in a reply to a poll that DOGE chief Elon Musk launched on his social media platform X asking users whether 25-year-old staffer Marko Elez should be rehired to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team.

“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 in a tweet.

“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” said Vance, referring to the fact that The Wall Street Journal on Thursday exposed Elez’s connection to an X account that made the inflammatory tweets.

“So I say bring him back,” Vance wrote. “If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”

Elez was one of a group of young adults on DOGE, which has been tasked by President Donald 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.

Elez resigned Thursday after the Journal asked the White House about posts on an X account linked to him.

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.

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 contributed to this article.