Despite being the single richest human being on the globe and perhaps the richest non-royal leader in history, everything about Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) screams “cheap.” While it is certainly true that Musk has made some significant calls with significant action (Most bad), the position itself still seems half-assed, it is unofficial, Elon Musk is a “special” employee, his reporting requirements are “special,” and the people that work for and with Musk aren’t paid, either. It is all just thrown together, half-cocked (fully loaded), and that includes the group’s website, which does have a .gov address but is apparently not hosted on a government server. The other thing about the DOGE site? It was hacked AF today and that allowed some people to have a good time with it, meaning that it’s possible that people could post fake stuff for others to have a good time with…
Elon Musk is the man who put you in contact with engineers who land rockets on their asses. These are not stupid people. They may have social issues, but not stupid. So try to explain how it is that the people associated with DOGE are, apparently – “stupid”… Or is it not stupidity so much as half-assed? According to a report in 404 Media, it is most definitely half-assed and that’s only the beginning:
The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”
Two Scooby snacks for “Ro-ro” indeed. Again, is it that unsurprising that these half-assed “special government employees” would actually care enough to do the single most important thing – making every conceivable effort to be transparent about official actions, the correct way, with a real .gov website, one really monitored by paid government employees who run websites like that of… the National Park Service, the IRS, or the State Department passport portal. Say what you will about our government and who it’s run by right now, but all three of those websites are .gov sites, all three are super clean, super useable, super professional, and one supposes, super tight and impossible to bust. So… ro-ro indeed, what makes DOGE special? Well, it was born that way and now lives on a cloud.
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. Both sources said that the way the site is set up suggests that it is not running on government servers.
Well, okay then. I highly suggest that you visit the three sites above, or even just the National Park Service page (Pick a park!) and then go to the .gov DOGE page here. Is it just me or is there an obvious difference that can be “felt” at least as much as “seen”? Is it possible to intuit or even just “see” that a site is built on cloudflare and not rooted in a server? Government or private server? I would’ve otherwise said “No,” had I not done my official “N=1” experiment. I believe one can tell simply by feel and no, not a tactile “feel,” either. Just that feel you feel when you know you know.
The fact that it feels all off doesn’t mean that the site should be an easy hack. I suspect that Musk has his situation such that his VISA number is protected on Amazon and that if I were to try to purchase a new Subaru Outback (Black, please) with his card that it would not go through and an alert would be put out to flag me for arrest. I suspect the situation is as described. So why would it be beyond “Special employee Musk” to find a website that would stand up to the same level of scrutiny? Well, it appears half-assed.
Even the DOGE “X” account sucks and looks suspect:
$1.9 billion of HUD money was just recovered after being misplaced during the Biden administration due to a broken process. These funds were earmarked for the administration of financial services, but were no longer needed. @SecretaryTurner and @DOGE worked together to fix the…
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February 14, 2025
Boy, does that explanation ever sound vaporous. Why didn’t they just write, “They said they needed the money but we disagreed. We investigated and were right! They did not need the money so we took it back!” It is just about the same level of specificity and same standard? Well, it is easier to hack but I guess that’s the point…
You get what you pay for! And given the fact that Musk made a very big deal about not being paid and being a “special” employee, we should make a big deal of saying that Musk should be made a real federal employee and be awarded the real salary commensurate with the real leader of a real department (About $177,000/year) and if Musk wants to give the money away, great. But he either works for the government or he doesn’t, none of this “special” stuff, he gets the salary but also the reporting requirements. He gets government insurance plans but must meet minimum standards for data protection.
Because if you think that the ease of the hack into the “transparency” was a “special” problem, wait until someone who was hurt by a DOGE decision, one wrestling a much-needed contract away, decides to sue Musk and the U.S. government. Musk and the government will likely be pointing at the other as “special” with respect to responsibility, while the aggrieved party will be going directly at Musk, because Elon isn’t an “official” employee, and yet acted to hurt the business in a personal way, and must suffer personal loss…
That would be special. Meanwhile, hacked off is what they are but no one is more deserving. Perhaps they ought to third-party this thing to get a real server and a real website.
God Bless: I can be reached at [email protected] and on X at @JasonMiciak and now on Bluesky
I.hope someone does sue. He seems desperate to.gut NIH. It would be so fitting if someone died because an experimental.drug was pulled to save money, died, and family files a wrongful death lawsuit, naming the Muskrat. And they get not millions but billions of his dirty money. And he has to pay their legal.bills and court costs. I don’t want someone to.die but the way they are going after HHS, it is inevitable.