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By James Bickerton
News Reporter
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The website of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which tech billionaire Elon Musk heads, is based around a database that can "be edited by anyone," according to a report first published by news outlet 404Media.
At 6:30 a.m. ET on Friday, the website's homepage contained a box seen by Newsweek with "This is a joke of a .gov site" written in large letters, while screenshots show the text previously read "THESE "EXPERTS" LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN – roro."
Newsweek reached out to Musk for comment via emails sent to the press offices of Tesla and SpaceX.
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Why It Matters
DOGE was created following President Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20 with the stated aim of slashing what the new administration deems wasteful government spending. It is run by tech billionaire Musk, a close Trump ally who previously indicated he would like to cut federal government spending by up to $2 trillion a year.
Despite its name, DOGE isn't an official government department but a temporary organization that Musk has said will shut down on July 4, 2026. The apparent outside editing of its website raises concerns about the competence of the DOGE team, especially considering they have been seeking access to U.S. Department of Treasury payment records containing the personal details of millions of Americans.
What To Know
Early on Friday morning, 404Media reported that the DOGE website could be edited "by anyone," citing two coders who claimed they had discovered a flaw in its setup.
The coders said doge.gov pulled data from an external database, and one could exploit this to post mocking messages on its homepage. The first read, "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN – roro," while the second said: "This is a joke of a .gov site."
Two website development experts told 404Media that the DOGE website appeared to have been based around a Cloudflare Pages site that wasn't hosted by government servers. Consequently, edits to the database, which third parties could make due to the lack of security, would appear on doge.gov.
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According to 404Media, the DOGE website was largely empty on Tuesday when Musk told reporters the department would be "as transparent as possible," adding: "In fact, our actions—we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website." New sections were then added to the website on Wednesday and Thursday.
On February 8, New York Federal Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued a temporary restraining order restricting DOGE from accessing the Treasury Department's payment system. This sparked a furious response from Musk, who suggested Engelmayer should face impeachment.
What People Are Saying
A coder told 404Media about the DOGE website: "Feels like it was completely slapped together. Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code."
A second coder said: "Basically, doge.gov has its codebase, probably through GitHub or something. They're deploying the website on Cloudflare Pages from their codebase, and doge.gov is a custom domain that their pages.dev URL is set to. So rather than having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they're deploying using Cloudflare Pages, which supports custom domains."
Coding expert Sam Curry, on X, formerly Twitter: "The DOGE website appears to be developed and hosted by Outburst Data, run by current DOGE employee Kyle Schutt.
"If you view the source of any page on the DOGE website, you'll see that the images are proxied through Cloudflare's ImageDelivery service."
What's Happens Next
It appears that the DOGE team has since fixed the issue with their website, as the messages are now gone. Whether they will succeed in their primary goal of substantially reducing federal government spending remains to be seen.
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