HOUSTON, United States

A staff member for US billionaire Elon Musk's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal revealed racist posts on the staffer's since-deleted social media account.

Marko Elez, 25, had just been approved by a federal judge to be added to the payroll through the US Treasury when the racist posts were brought to the attention of the White House.

"You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity," the user @nullllptr posted on X in September, the Journal reported, establishing that user name to its previous username of @marko_elez, which was traced back to the user describing himself "as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink, where Elez has worked, according to archives of Elez's personal website."

"I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth," said another post, as well as "Normalize Indian hate," in which Elez made reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley," according to the Journal.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the Journal that Elez resigned after reporters inquired about the racist posts on his since-deleted X account, but the public nature of his resignation has put the vetting process of new DOGE appointees under scrutiny, especially after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg News in an interview published Thursday that he had personally vetted one of the two Treasury employees that were approved under Musk's new team.

"These are highly trained professionals," Bessent told Bloomberg. "This is not some roving band running around doing things. This is methodical, and it is going to yield big savings."

Instead, Musk's new role as the head of DOGE under President Donald Trump has started off on a bumpy road, as Elez resigned before he even started his position as a special government employee who would have helped oversee the slashing of government spending and reducing the federal workforce to save taxpayers billions of dollars.

"Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," Elez posted on X, according to the Journal.