At a press conference in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk promised that his so-called action on the Ministry of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project would be “the greatest transparency” thanks to its Information posted on the website.
When posting a comment, the Doge website is empty. But when the site finally surfed online on Thursday morning, it turned out that it wasn't just a glorious feed of posts from Musk's official Doge account on his own X platform, which raised new questions about Musk's conflict of interest on running Doge .
doge.gov claims to be “the official website of the U.S. government,” but does not elaborate on the detailed breakdown of cost savings and efficiency that Musk claims his project is being produced, but rather the homepage of the site has just copied Doge on X from X account. .
Wired comments on the page source code show that promoting Musk's own platform is more in-depth than copying posts on the homepage. The source code shows that the site's canonical tag will directly access search engines to X.com instead of doge.gov.
A standard tag is a code snippet that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is often used by sites with multiple pages as a search engine optimization strategy to avoid diluting their rankings.
However, in the case of Doge, the code informs search engines that when people search for content on doge.gov, they should not show these pages in search results, but posts on X.
“It takes X accounts as the primary source and takes the secondary source of the website,” Web developer Declan Chidlow told WIRED. “This is not usually the way to deal with it, which suggests that X accounts take precedence over the actual website itself.”
All other U.S. government websites Cable use their homepage in their norm tags, including the official White House website. Additionally, when sharing a Doge website on a mobile device, the source code creates a link to the Doge X account instead of the website itself.
“It seems that Doge websites are secondary, and they are pushing people everywhere in the direction of their account X,” Chidlow added.
In addition to the homepage feed of X's post, a portion of Doge.gov is marked “Save.” So far, the page is empty, except for a line reading: “The receipt arrives soon, no later than Valentine's Day,” followed by the heart emoji.
The section titled “Work Force” has some bar charts showing how many people work in each government agency, and this information comes from data collected 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 organizational chart. It's a huge effort and there may be some errors or omissions. We will continue over time.” Work hard to improve the highest accuracy.”
Another section titled “Regulations” features what Doge calls “Unconstitutional Index,” which is called “the number of agency rules that are created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress in 2024.”
