Elon Musk set up a website for his Department of Government Efficiency to track cuts to the federal budget, but it had a lot of trouble getting off the ground. The DOGE site went live on Feb. 12 as part of a commitment by Musk to be "as transparent as possible" but immediately appeared prone to a number of pitfalls.
The website seemed to be partially fixed once Musk discovered the problem, but not before online users were able to take advantage of it at DOGE's expense. Some are wondering if the debacle is indicative of things to come.
What happened with the website?
The website, www.doge.gov, was set up as a "portal tracking the size of the federal workforce and documenting the number of federal regulations," said The Washington Post. It currently includes a stream of X posts showing a "running log of the actions" that DOGE is taking to slash government funding, including one "applauding the Department of Education, for example, for canceling grants in line with Musk's effort to cut $1 trillion in federal spending."
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Before this, though, it appeared that the website got off to a haphazard launch. At the outset, the website was simply a "default WordPress sample page that includes language about an imaginary architecture firm," according to tech publication 404Media. The only thing identifying it as a government website appeared to be a tagline at the top that read: "Waste.gov: Tracking government waste."
Eventually, this was fixed, but a new problem emerged: the website was found to be "insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone," said another report from 404Media. This was largely because the website was not hosted on a government server but on an open platform called Cloudflare Pages. This led to several posts on the site that read, "This is a joke of a .gov site" and "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."
The website "feels like it was completely slapped together. Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code," an anonymous coder said to 404Media.
What is happening now?
It "appears that the DOGE team has since fixed the issue with their website, as the messages are now gone," said Newsweek. But this is not the only government website that has experienced issues under the new Trump administration; the "newly created Waste.gov site was hidden behind a password after going live with a default WordPress template," said Mashable, in a manner similar to the DOGE website.
The DOGE page is "still very much a work in progress," said Fortune, and it is unclear if similar problems could arise in the future. The agency has "come under considerable fire for its rapid pace changes to several government departments over the past several weeks." Aside from the cuts to the Education Department, this also includes the controversial shuttering of the nation's primary foreign aid agency, USAID.
The website rollout doesn't seem to have generated much of a response from Musk, who often interacts with people directly on X. He has "yet to comment on the hacks as he continues promising 'transparency,'" said The New Republic. The website has also "posted classified information" about the country's satellite intelligence-building agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, according to HuffPost, which could create further controversy.
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