At a press conference in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk promised that the actions of its so -called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) would be ‘maximum transparent’, thanks to information posted on his website.
At the time of his remark, the Doge website was empty. However, when the website finally comes online Thursday morning, it seems little more than a glorified feed of posts of the official does account on Musk’s own X -platform, leaving new questions about Musk’s interest clashes in the management of Doge arise.
Doge.gov claims to be an ‘official US government website’, but rather than providing detailed collapses of the cost savings and efficiency that Musk claims to be his project, the homepage of the website has just been reblogged by the website. Doge account on x.
A fraudulent overview of the source code of the page shows that promoting Musk’s own platform has gone deeper than repeating the posts on the homepage. The source code shows that the canonical labels of the website direct search engines to x.com rather than Doge.gov.
A canonical label is a piece of code that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is typically used by websites with various pages as an optimization tactic for search engines to prevent their search rankings from being diluted.
However, in Doge’s case, the code is to inform search engines that when people are looking for content found on Doge.GOV, they should not show the pages in search results, but rather show the posts on X.
“It promotes the X account as the main source, with the secondary website,” says Declan Chidlow, a web developer, to Wired. “This is usually not how things are handled, and it indicates that the X account takes precedence over the actual website itself.”
All the other US government sites that were checked used their own homepage in their canonical labels, including the official website of the White House. In addition, when the Doge website shares 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 set people in the direction of the X account wherever they can,” Chidlow adds.
Along the X -post home page, a portion of Doge.gov with the name “Saving” now appears. So far, the page is empty, except for a single rule that reads: ‘Receipts come soon, no later than Valentine’s Day’, followed by a heart emoji.
A section entitled Workforce contains some bar charts showing how many people work in each government agency, with the information derived from data collected by the Office or Personnel Management in March 2024.
A disclaimer at the bottom of the page reads: ‘This is Doge’s attempt to create an extensive, government-wide org card. This is an enormous effort, and there are probably some mistakes or omissions. We will continue to strive for maximum accuracy over time. “
Another section, entitled ‘Regulations’, contains what the’ unconstitutional index ‘calls, which describes it as’ the number of agencies created by unelected bureaucrats for each law adopted by the congress in 2024. ‘