The deep state looks out for its own, and with DOGE in its crosshairs, has struck again through its media allies.

So now we see another swing at a young DOGE software engineer ferreting out waste and fraud in the government from a former USAID contractor, forcing him out of a job for some years-ago bad tweets, after what must have been quite a search for something to pin on him.

According to The Hill:

An Elon Musk deputy who accessed sensitive Treasury Department payment systems has resigned after social media posts of his came to light that espoused racist beliefs.

Marko Elez, 25, who worked for a number of companies run by Elon Musk and was part of the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force engaged in dismantling federal offices, resigned Thursday, a White House official told The Hill.

Elez’s racist, now-deleted social media posts were uncovered and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“Normalize Indian hate,” the account associated with Elez posted in September, regarding people of Indian ethnicity who work in the U.S. tech sector, the Journal reported.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on Elon Musk’s social media site X, the Journal reported.

Yes, very, very stupid to write those very bad ideas, but young software engineering nerds, like Olympic athletes, with no knowledge of anything else, aren't exactly famous for their maturity. And if he's autistic, as some DOGE team members reportedly are, their social skills. The engineer was there for his tech prowess, not his ill-conceived ideas, which he has since had sense enough to delete, and has neither said anything nor written anything like that while on the job with Musk. Leftists, it must be noted, do this all the time -- without consequences.

Or this charmer at the New York Times who had such big problems with white people:

Sarah Jeong: NY Times stands by 'racist tweets' reporter

Remember her?

So now the old cancel-culture template is active again, the DOGE engineer is out, and Musk is deprived of his formidable skills by freshly hired Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Long, whose forte seems to be in exposing conservatives who threaten the establishment by digging into their pasts and even those of their relatives for anything that will discredit them before they can do their jobs. Long actually advertises for it, as if throwing out the call to the left's army of Googlers:

And surprise, surprise, she is a former USAID contractor.

Elez got exposed out by the last one, another former USAID denizen and ex-NewsGuard operative, Vittoria Elliott of Wired magazine, in a hit piece about Elez's access to U.S. Treasury systems in his line of work:

A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Oh, shiver.

She seems to be worried he's going to help himself to the funds instead of do his job, or that U.S. data will be mined and spread around the way their ChiCom pals at TikTok and DeepSeek collect theirs. There's not a scintilla of evidence that there is, and the young man is legitimately there at the explicit instructions of the president.

But cancel culture is still around, particularly since leftists have nothing left on offer except the waste and fraud that's rampant in the wake of Joe Biden's hellish administration. They must defend waste and fraud, because so many leftist rice bowls are at stake, but they can't do it openly.

Hence, the doxx weapon -- first from former USAID contractor Elliott and now from former USAID contractor Long. If you can't defeat them on ideas, go ad hominem.

What are the odds ... ?

Just a coincidence that USAID has been such a font of media support, making payouts one way or another to the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, the AP, Bill Kristol and the rest, right? Just a coincidence that both hit-job reporters have these USAID pasts, right? No conflict of interest, no bias, right? Just a coincidence they both went to Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, which by the looks of it, was at about the same time, right? Heck they even look alike.

Just a coincidence.

Long has a particularly disgusting history of this kind of expose, as financier Bill Ackman noted on X:

Ackman's wife became the target of an expose by Long who claimed the wife had plagiarized her doctoral thesis from Wikipedia, after she took a few boilerplate passages of background information, which, yes, was careless, to support her original work and then, using that, promoted it as full blown plagiarism before any of them even had a chance to reply, as if she stole an actual idea the way the now former president of Stanford was caught doing.

Here's what the hedge fund biggie meant:

And why did she do it? Because Ackman spoke out against antisemitism festering at Ivy League campuses, which made headlines and the elitist academic establishment obviously saw as a threat. That triggered the hit jobs in the press, and apparently they couldn't find anything on Bill, so they went after the wife.

Now they went after the Musk engineer, a pair of them, as if they were working as a tag team.

Kurt Schlichter thinks it was a mistake for DOGE to bend on this:

To be fair, we don't know why the engineer left -- maybe it was too stressful for him as someone on the autism spectrum or something like that and he really wanted to do something else. We don't actually know if he was fired, but we know he is out.

But it's possible he was pushed as a result of this creeping and crawling coterie in the press, dripping with conflicts of interest, and that isn't good.

The more we look at this, the less we like it.

Two of the tech bros in the White House are taking note:

The last thing DOGE needs is a return to the old system of one set of standards for the left, and another set for the right. The Judeo-Christian tradition calls this kind of dirt-digging 'detraction,' 'talebearing,' and the violation of 'natural secrets, which the Catholics call a source of strife.

It would be way better to bring this guy back.

And for goodness sakes, nullify all the beavering done by substandard reporters like Long and Elliott, whose intentions are anything but public spirited.

Image: X screen shot