A few days after going online, the website of the Elon Musk-led US Government Efficiency (DOGE) was hacked and left messages.
On February 13-14, some white hat hackers tried to break into the US Government Efficiency doge.gov website and left messages such as: "This is a joke of a website with the .gov extension" or "Their experts open the database". These messages were later deleted.
Citing two web developer experts, 404Media - the first to report the hack on February 14 - assessed that doge.gov appears to be built on the Cloudflare Pages platform, which is not hosted on government servers. The website's database is being pulled mostly from third parties, then displayed on the live site.
One expert said he was able to get the full updates, the government's employment database, and found the database's API endpoint. "The site feels like it's been patched together," he added. "There are tons of bugs and details leaked in the source code of the site."
"Basically, doge.gov is open sourcing its code from somewhere else, probably through GitHub or something similar," another developer said. "Instead of having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they're deploying it using Cloudflare Pages which supports customization."
Musk and DOGE have not commented.
According to Bloomberg, doge.gov appeared to have been rushed after Musk told reporters earlier this week that his Office of Government Efficiency was “trying to be as transparent as possible.” The site went live on February 11 but was blank. A few days later, the site’s main content pointed to DOGE’s X account, interspersed with images of various statistics about the US government’s federal workforce. At the top was a message: “An official US government website.”
Wired analyzed the source code and found that doge.gov “appears to favor X.” In addition to directly referencing Musk’s social media posts, a snippet of code showed that it directed search engines to x.com instead of doge.gov, meaning search queries would tell engines like Google to prioritize X over DOGE’s home page.
“It shows that DOGE’s X account is the official source, and the website is secondary. This is not a common practice, and it shows that DOGE is more focused on X,” Declan Chidlow, a programmer who developed the website, told Wired.
Musk previously said that DOGE was gathering a group of “the best software engineers in the world” aged 19-24. At the time, citing internal sources and a combination of public databases and online records, Wired said the group consisted of six people, with virtually no government experience.