The TOI correspondent from Washington: With backing from President Donald Trump and vice-president JD Vance, Government Efficiency major-domo Elon Musk announced on Friday that he is re-hiring a young DOGE staffer who resigned earlier this week after being outed for racist social media posts that trashed interracial marriages, derided Indians H1B workers, and sought to “normalize Indian hate.”
“He will be brought back.
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To err is human, to forgive divine,” Musk said after an online poll he initiated on his platform X showed 78 per cent of respondent wanted him to rehire Marko Elez, a 25-year old DOGE musketeer elevated to scrutinize government spending, who had boasted in a since-deleted social media account that he was “racist before it was cool.”
Among other things, Elez called for repealing the Civil Rights Act and expressed contempt for mixed marriages, writing, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
He also claimed that “99 per cent of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs they’re going back, don’t worry guys” and suggested he would not care if “Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” LLMs are Large Language Modes for machine learning in AI parlance.
Elez reinstatement into DOGE was initiated by vice-president JD Vance — whose wife Usha Chilukuri Vance, is Indian — who said he “obviously disagreed” 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. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that,’ Vance argued, referring to Elez’s posts first reported in the Wall Street Journal.
Vance’s stance was backed by President Trump, who indicated he did not know details of the case but if the vice president backed the reinstatement “I’m with the vice president.”
The episode led to a testy online spat between Vance and Indian-American Congressman Ro Khanna, who asked, “Are you going to tell him (Elez) to apologize for saying “Normalize Indian hate” before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
“For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” Vance shot back, bristling at the oblique reference to his Indian-American children with Usha Chilukuri. “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.
Ro Khanna: No one is denying grace to people who make mistakes. I respect Usha (praised her publicly) & defended your family from some of the vicious attacks. But if you are going to rehire someone to represent you & the USA, why not insist he apologize for saying “Normalize Indian hate?”
JD Vance: I don’t worry about my kids making mistakes, or developing views they later regret. I don’t even worry that much about trolls on the internet. You know what I do worry about, Ro?
That they’ll grow up to be a US Congressmen who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts. You disgust me. I cannot overstate how much I loathe this emotional blackmail pretending to be concern.
Ro Khanna: Saying I am “whiny” & “you disgust me” maybe your way of showing strength. Personally, I don’t think you have to hurl insults or be mean-spirited to have a free exchange ideas. Our country, at its, best (Lincoln/Douglass) was not like that and you at your best JD were not either.
Elez, 25, is one of more than half-dozen “Musketeers,” including Indian-American Akash Bobba (22), who have been deployed by the world’s richest man and Trump acolyte Elon Musk to unearth what they see as wasteful spending, fraud, and corruption in the government. The so-called “nerd army” is said to be camping out in hallowed government edifices working through nights, fueled by take-out pizza, coffee, and energy drinks, summoning senior government officials and bureaucrats and trying to understand line-item expenses and taking control of payment systems.
The access they have gained and their intrusive work has alarmed the traditional Washington establishment, even as Trump-Musk MAGA base has delighted in the exposes pointing to billions of dollars of what they see as wasteful government spending and largesse for liberal causes.
On Saturday, a federal judge in New York issued an emergency order prohibiting Musk’s DOGE from accessing personal and financial data on millions of Americans kept at the Treasury Department, after Attorneys General from 19 Democrat-run states sued to stop the intrusion.