As admissions go, it was an uncomfortable one. In one of several affidavits filed on the night of February 11th, Joseph Gioeli, a Treasury official in charge of technology at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, said that Marko Elez, a former Twitter engineer associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (doge) had in fact had the ability to write code into the bureau’s sensitive payment systems. Mr Elez’s computer, Mr Gioeli testified, had “mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions” on one system. This came after officials insisted to Congress and to journalists that doge’s access was “read only.”