Vice President Vance on Friday argued that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer who resigned after social media posts of his came to light that espoused racist beliefs should be hired back.
Vance, in speaking out about the issue, said that social media posts shouldn’t be the reason he is fired, calling the 25-year-old aide to DOGE head Elon Musk a “kid.”
“Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” the vice president said on social platform X. “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,” he added.
He was replying to a post from Musk on X, polling the public on whether he should bring back the “staffer who made inappropriate statements.”
Marko Elez, who had “read-only” access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems and was engaged in dismantling federal offices through DOGE, resigned on 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.
The Journal also reported that the account wrote, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
Elez was a central figure of DOGE’s overhaul of federal agencies, which also this week involved Musk and his associates overrunning the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
