The official website for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which tech billionaire Elon Musk heads, was reportedly hacked on Friday, sending waves of confusion and amusement through the internet.
The DOGE website is based around a database that can “be edited by anyone,” according to a report first published by news outlet 404 Media.
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 has contacted DOGE for comment via X.
Why It Matters
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
The two web developers told 404 Media the doge.gov website appears to be hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which is a platform used for building and deploying websites, but it’s not currently hosted on official government servers. This means the website isn’t being managed or protected by government infrastructure so it can be accessed and modified by third parties and those changes will immediately appear on the live site.
Sipa/AP
One of the developers told 404 Media that they were able to make updates to a database of government employment information by analyzing the structure of the doge.gov website.
The DOGE team has since fixed the issue with the website, as the messages are now gone. Nonetheless, the incident has prompted mockery online, with one X user, journalist and influencer Karly Kingsley, suggesting that Musk’s “army of minions” at DOGE” lacked the skills to run the website.
404 Media noted that the DOGE website was hastily deployed after Elon Musk told reporters Tuesday that his Department of Government Efficiency was “trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions—we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website.” At that point, DOGE was essentially a blank webpage. However, by Wednesday and Thursday, the site had been expanded and now mirrors the posts from the @DOGE X account, along with various statistics about the U.S. government’s federal workforce.
“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” one of the developers told 404 Media of the DOGE website. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
What People Are Saying
One web developer told 404 Media: “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.”
Journalist and influencer Karly Kingsley wrote on X: “The DOGE Website was hacked right after it was launched, if you want to know how masterfully skilled Elon’s little army of minions are. Hint: not at all.”
Poet Jorie Graham wrote on X: “Because he’s such a genius. And his techbro boys are so very good at this. Elon Musk’s DOGE launched its website. It was hacked within days.”
X user Pesach Lattin, who described himself as a former hacker, wrote on X: “DOGE website hacked because the ‘experts’ didn’t do basic security settings… And you trust them to do anything?”
Elon Musk told reporters on Tuesday during a press conference in the Oval Office: “At a high level, you say what is the goal of DOGE, and I think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?”
