On Feb 15, 2025, at 6:17 PM, Jason McKemie
<j.mcke...@veloxinetbroadband.com> wrote:
This seems about par for the course with these guys. Scary
stuff.
I love how this administration uses the term "maximally
transparent", or some derivation thereof everywhere they
can. I guess if you say it enough, it must be true, right?
On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 5:59 PM Ken Hohhof
<khoh...@kwom.com> wrote:
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-website-is-just-one-big-x-ad/
DOGE’s Website Is Just One Big X Ad
*The source code for the new Department of Government
Efficiency’s “official US government website” points to
X as its primary source of authority, while sharing
links to the site sends users to x.com <http://x.com>.*
At a press conference in the Oval Office
<https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/12/tech/elon-musk-x-oval-office/index.html>
this
week, Elon Musk promised the actions of his so-called
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
<https://www.wired.com/tag/doge/> project would be
“maximally transparent,” thanks to information posted
to its website.
At the time of his comment, the DOGE website was empty
<https://bsky.app/profile/joncooper-us.bsky.social/post/3lhwsmk4iac2u>.
However, when the site finally came online Thursday
morning, it turned out to be little more than a
glorified feed of posts from the official DOGE account
on Musk’s own X platform, raising new questions about
Musk’s conflicts of interest in running DOGE
<https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-doge-cfpb>.
DOGE.gov claims to be an “official website of the
United States government,” but rather than giving
detailed breakdowns of the cost savings and
efficiencies Musk claims his project is making, the
homepage of the site just replicated posts from the
DOGE account on X.
A WIRED review of the page’s source code shows that the
promotion of Musk’s own platform went deeper than
replicating the posts on the homepage. The source code
shows that the site’s canonical tags
<https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization> direct
search engines to x.com <http://x.com> rather than
DOGE.gov.
A canonical tag is a snippet of code that tells search
engines what the authoritative version of a website is.
It is typically used by sites with multiple pages as a
search engine optimization tactic, to avoid their
search ranking being diluted.
In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search
engines that when people search for content found on
DOGE.gov, they should not show those pages in search
results, but should instead display the posts on X.
“It is promoting the X account as the main source, with
the website secondary,” Declan Chidlow, a web developer
<https://vale.rocks/>, tells WIRED. “This isn't usually
how things are handled, and it indicates that the X
account is taking priority over the actual website itself.”
Advertisement
All the other US government websites WIRED checked used
their own homepage in their canonical tags, including
the official White House website. Additionally, when
sharing the DOGE website on mobile devices, the source
code creates a link to the DOGE X account rather than
the website itself.
“It seems that the DOGE website is secondary, and they
are prodding people in the direction of the X account
everywhere they can,” Chidlow adds.
Alongside the homepage feed of X posts, a section of
Doge.gov labeled “Savings” now appears. So far the page
is empty except for a single line that reads: “Receipts
coming soon, no later than Valentine's day,” followed
by a heart emoji
<https://www.wired.com/story/heart-emoji-lost-all-meaning/>.
A section entitled “Workforce” features some bar charts
showing how many people work in each government agency,
with the information coming from data gathered by the
Office of Personnel Management in March 2024.
A disclaimer at the bottom of the page reads: “This is
DOGE's effort to create a comprehensive,
government-wide org chart. This is an enormous effort,
and there are likely some errors or omissions. We will
continue to strive for maximum accuracy over time.”
Another section, entitled “Regulations,” features what
DOGE calls the “Unconstitutionality Index,” which it
describes as “the number of agency rules created by
unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress
in 2024.”
The charts in this section are also based on data
previously collected by US government agencies.
Doge.gov also links to a Forbes article from last month
that was written by Clyde Wayne Crews, a member of the
Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that
pushed climate change disinformation
<https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/heartland-institute-leak-exposes-strategies-of-climate-attack-machine/>
and
questioned the links between tobacco and lung cancer
<https://www.tobaccotactics.org/article/heartland-institute/>.
It is also a major advocate for privatizing government
departments
<https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/in-shift-key-climate-denialist-group-heartland-institute-pivots-to-policy/>.
The site also features a “Join” page which allows
prospective DOGE employees to apply for roles including
“software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other
technology professionals.” As well as requesting a
Github account and résumé, the form asks visitors to
“provide 2-3 bullet points showcasing exceptional ability.”
The website does not list a developer, but on
Wednesday, web application security expert Sam Curry
outlined in a thread on X
<https://x.com/samwcyo/status/1889527715029557607> how
he was able to identify the developer of the site as
DOGE employee Kyle Shutt.
Curry claims he was able to link a Cloudflare account
ID found in the site’s source code to Shutt, who used
the same account when developing Musk’s America PAC
<https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-america-pac-election-denial-community-x/>
website.
On Thursday, Drop Site News
<https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/doge-fema-funding-access-social-security-numbers>
reported,
citing sources within FEMA, that Shutt had gained
access to the agency’s proprietary software controlling
payments. Earlier this week, Business Insider reported
<https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-staff-list-white-house-2025-2>
that
Shutt, who recently worked at an AI interviewing
software company, was listed as one of 30 people
working for DOGE.
Neither Shutt, DOGE, nor the White House responded to
requests for comment.
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