Elon Musk's DOGE is the new Wikipedia

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) website, or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization as it is officially known, is a treasury watchdog initiative of the second Donlad Trump presidency led by Elon Musk. And yet, a serious organisation as this, of the US federal government no less, is wide open for anyone to edit, like Wikipedia is.

DOGE has unprecedented access to sensitive data of US financial systems on millions of American citizens. Two web development experts reported the security flaw to 404Media after discovering that doge.gov is pulling from a database that third parties can access and update, pushing unauthorized entries to the live website.

“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.”

Both pages are still visible hours after 404Media published its report. While the doge.gov website describes itself as “an official website of the United States government,” with the help of a banner on the site, the developers say it “feels like it was completely slapped together” and doesn’t appear to be running on government servers.

This discovery reiterates a poor track record for the White House’s website administration—on Feb. 12, the newly created waste.gov site was found to be displaying an unedited WordPress template and was hidden and locked down. The DOGE website was launched in January, but aside from displaying “three lines of text and a cartoony logo” later removed, it stayed empty for weeks.

On 11 February, during an Oval Office press conference, Elon Musk boasted that DOGE’s cost-cutting actions have been “maximally transparent” because the organisation was publishing its activity to X and the DOGE website —no matter the latter was devoid of information at the time.

After an update on 13 February, the doge.gov site now displays posts published to the DOGE X account, alongside various stats about US government regulations and its federal workforce.