One of the continuing mysteries about the DOGE intrusion into the super sensitive payments computer system housed at the Treasury Department is just what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as well as other administration officials and lawyers mean by “read-only” access. For starters, it’s not clear that “read-only” is actually a privilege level on the systems in question. But that’s kind of a technical detail. More importantly, both Wired and TPM have independently reported that now-defenestrated DOGE operative Marko Elez in fact had administrator-level privileges on the same system. In other words, not “read only,” but full access to do pretty much anything if they chose to. And that’s not what people are thinking when they hear “read-only.” So what is it? Are the Treasury Secretary or the DOJ lawyers who went into court lying? Is there some technicality we’re not thinking of?
Earlier today I speculated that the issue might be a distinction between the data and the code. As I noted then, I know of no evidence that they’ve altered any data and it’s not even clear why they’d want to. So maybe that’s the answer: a perhaps deceptive but still narrowly accurate claim.
Having now done some additional reporting, I can now say pretty confidently that this is in fact the issue. When they say they only have “read-only” access, they’re talking about the data, not the code, even though administrator privileges and the ability to alter the code base has been central to all the public conversation about this.
Once we focus on this distinction, everything falls into place. It’s misleading but not false.
To make sense of this you have to look at the legal case that got this into court. The claim is pretty narrow and it has to do with government employees saying that their personal data is being exposed to non-government employees or people who are technically government employees but not really. Since that is the basis of the lawsuit, the way the plaintiffs got into court, it’s the only relevant question for the purposes of the litigation. Whether the DOGErs have write-privileges to the code or whether they’ve altered the code — that’s totally irrelevant for the purposes of this case. It may be a huge deal for a million other reasons but not for this case.
If you look closely at the letter a Treasury official sent in response to questions from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), this distinction is actually made clear … if you read closely. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Jonathan Blum assures Wyden that “Treasury staff members working with Tom Krause, a Treasury employee, will have read-only access to the coded data of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems…” (emphasis added).
He simply doesn’t address whether they have any control over or ability to alter the code. In the court case it’s irrelevant. In this letter it’s true as far as we know about the data. So it’s true. The fact that people reading it are thinking this is in some way a denial of reports that the DOGErs got write-privileges for the code … well, I think they figure if people are confused about precisely what they’re referring to by “read-only,” welp, not their problem.
So yeah, this is the answer. In practice these amount to non-denial denials of the whole question of why Marko Elez — seemingly the first administration staffer to actually take advantage of the resignation program — was given this mind-boggling level of control over this critical system, and what he did with those privileges.
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