'Completely slapped together': Musk’s DOGE mocked after members 'left their database open'
FILE PHOTO: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Sultan Al Olama attend a plenary session titled 'Boring cities, AI, and DOGE' at the World Governments Summit, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, February 13, 2025. REUTERS/Amr Alfiky/File Photo
The website for Elon Musk’s Department for Government Accountability, doge.gov — which tracks their cuts to the federal government — is not secure, 404 Media reported Friday. Musk has been leading a Trump-sanctioned push to slash agencies, freeze funding and lay off government workers.
The site “pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone,” writes 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler. A website database stores and manages a site’s information.
Two database entries visible on the live site say: “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”
DOGE is “trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions—we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website,” Musk told reporters Tuesday. The website, built out Wednesday and Thursday, has a feed that includes DOGE X posts and images of government contracts.
Koebler writes, “Two different web development experts who asked to remain anonymous because they were probing a federal website told 404 Media that doge.gov is seemingly built on a Cloudflare Pages site that is not currently hosted on government servers. The database it is pulling from can be and has been written to by third parties, and will show up on the live website.”
“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” one source said. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
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Musk said Thursday that he could be cutting entire agencies.
"It's kind of like leaving a weed: If you don't remove the roots of the weed, then it's easy for the weed to grow back," he said at the 2025 World Governments Summit in Dubai. "But if you remove the roots of the weed it doesn't stop weeds from ever growing back, but it makes it harder."
404 Media reported Wednesday that another site, waste.gov, “was sitting live with a placeholder Wordpress default template page and sample text.” Now a password is needed to access the site.
DOGE did not reply to 404 Media’s request for comment.
