At a press conference in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk this week promised the actions of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project would be “maximally transparent” thanks to information posted to its website.
At the time of his comment, the DOGE website was empty. 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.
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 direct search engines to 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 an 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, tells WIRED. “This isn’t usually how things are handled and indicates that the X account is taking priority over the actual website itself.”
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.
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.”
