Elon Musk's DOGE.gov Was Made So Sloppily That Anyone Can Vandalize It

Multi-hyphenate tech billionaire and White House advisor Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency has already garnered a reputation for employing underqualified high school gradsand other twenty-something dimwits, not to mention installing unsecured email servers.

And the entity's official website, DOGE.gov, doesn't instill much confidence either. As 404 Media discovered, the website is so sloppily made that it lets anybody make changes to an unsecured database that it's pulling from, resulting in a wave of vandalism.

Unknown hackers have already had plenty of fun with the glaring oversight, publishing a post that reads "this is a joke of a .gov site" and "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."

It's a pathetic attempt to scrape together an online presence for a department that has already crawled through highly sensitive data belonging to a considerable and still growing number of US government departments. The poorly constructed website highlights Musk's well-established move-fast-and-break-things approach to running his businesses — except, this time around, the entire US government is at stake, not just some microblogging platform he lost buckets of money on.

The news comes after Musk claimed that a DOGE website for tracking "government waste" was brimming with his accomplishments during a bizarre press conference on Wednesday, even though the hastily put-together website, waste.gov, was literally just an empty boilerplate at the time.

Afterward, DOGE.gov finally replaced its placeholder. But as 404 reports, it was pulling from a Cloudflare Pages site hosting the code that kept it running. A source told the publication that it was able to "push updates to a database of government employment information."

"Feels like it was completely slapped together," the source told 404 . "Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code."

After the vulnerability came to light, DOGE.gov was temporarily put behind a paywall. At the time of writing, DOGE.gov is again pulling a stream of tweets from DOGE's X-formerly-Twitter account on its homepage.

The website also hosts a so-called "unconstitutionality index," which, according to DOGE, is the "number of agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress in 2024."

A "Savings" tab still bears a placeholder message, promising "receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine's day."

In short, Musk's DOGE has done little, if anything, to instill any degree of confidence given its IT track record so far.

The so-called department's carelessness has already triggered legal action. A motion filed with the DC District Court by National Security Counselors accused DOGE of illegally connecting a server to a government network for harvesting information, including federal employee names.

DOGE has also started gutting the General Services Administration's (GSA) Technology Transformation Services, as Wired reported earlier this week, letting go of upwards of 70 employees.

The publication also revealed that DOGE is training an AI chatbot for the GSA, which manages office buildings and IT infrastructure across the federal government.

But considering Musk and his cronies can't even put together a coherent website, the future of such a chatbot feels pretty hazy.

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