A major security breach at the US Treasury Department has been revealed after a 25-year-old aide to Elon Musk was mistakenly granted edit access to a critical payment system handling trillions of dollars and millions of Americans' personal data.

The US Treasury Department’s payment servers hold the tax returns, social security data and bank account numbers of every adult citizen of the United States. They are, one would assume, among the most highly secured servers on earth and yet it seems that all the employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) needed to do to access these systems after January 20 was to walk into Treasury Department offices and demand access to the servers’ credentials.