Elon Musk’s DOGE website seems to have been hacked, with tech experts commenting that the site feels “completely slapped together.”
The tech billionaire was appointed head of the US government’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by President Donald Trump. His role was to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The website officially went live on Wednesday (February 12), with Musk promising that the department would be “maximally transparent” after critics pointed out the irony of the world’s richest man being in charge of cutting funds, while his own companies, like SpaceX, have benefited from the federal budget.
“I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization,” the Twitter owner said during his meeting with Trump in the Oval Office this week.
However, the website didn’t remain secure for long, as two of its pages were attacked by hackers on Friday (February 14), according to 404 Media.
One cryptic message was left on the site, reading: “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN – roro.”
A second message followed: “This is a joke of a .gov site.”
Both of them have been taken down since then.
Web development experts shared with the tech news outlet that the DOGE site “feels like it was completely slapped together,” with “tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
The experts also mentioned that they believed DOGE’s site was not hosted on government servers.
In addition, DOGE allegedly published classified staffing information from a US intelligence agency, according to Huffpost.
The feature allows users to “trace” their “tax dollars from the bureaucracy” and investigate Cabinet-level agencies and other departments, reviewing staffing numbers and total wages earned.
A note on the page clarifies that the data excludes military personnel, Postal Service workers, White House staff, and other intelligence agencies. However, DOGE’s database does provide details about the federal agency responsible for US intelligence satellites.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is the only intelligence agency featured on the website. As reported by The Independent, Musk’s SpaceX holds a $1.8 billion contract with the NRO to build spy satellites.
Meanwhile, SpaceX also has contracts worth about $15 billion with NASA, making DOGE’s investigation into the space agency’s spending quite intriguing.
When asked whether Musk’s involvement with DOGE might lead to conflicts of interest at NASA, Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator, assured, “We have very strict conflict of interest policies,” adding that the agency’s legal office would review any DOGE employee for potential conflicts, according to Reuters.
Since then, Musk and his DOGE team have initiated a cost-cutting initiative, resulting in thousands of federal employee layoffs, while the department itself has significantly increased its spending.
Government records obtained by Fortune show that the scheme had spent $6.75 million by January, with the total amount rising to $14.4 million by February 8.
