President Donald Trump on Friday deferred to Vice President JD Vance and backed rehiring a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) member who was revealed to have supported eugenics.
“One of the DOGE engineers was fired for some inappropriate posts. The vice president says, bring him back. What do you say?” Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked the president during an unrelated news conference.
“Well, I don’t know about the particular thing, but if the vice president said that — did you say that?” Trump asked Vance, who was sitting in the audience. “I’m with the vice president.”
Vance had expressed support for DOGE member Marko Elez, 25, who resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he owned a social media account that backed eugenics and made racist comments online. Among the posts from the X account @nullllptr:
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted last July.
September: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
And another post, in response to a user talking about the prevalence of people of Indian heritage in Silicon Valley, said, “Normalize Indian hate.”
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but 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 said on X. “So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Musk, who had asked his X audience earlier in the day whether he should rehire Elez, said he was bringing him back in response to Vance’s tweet.
“He will be brought back,” Musk tweeted. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Elez was one of two DOGE members who had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which is used to pay nearly all of the United States’ bills and contains the financial data of millions of Americans. A court ruled Thursday that Elez and fellow DOGE member Tom Krause could continue to access the system, but they are prohibited from sharing or altering the information.
