During a press conference in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk promised that the actions of his so -called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) project would be 'maximum transparent', thanks to information posted on its website.
At the time of his remark, the doge website was empty. However, when the site finally came online on Thursday morning, it turned out to be little more than a glorified feed of the official Doge account on Musk's own X platform, so that new questions were raised about the conflict of interest in the running of Doge.
Doge.GOV claims to be an 'official website of the US government', but instead of giving detailed breakdowns of the cost savings and efficiency musk claims.
A CBNewz assessment of the source code of the page shows that the promotion of Musk's own platform has gone deeper than replicating the messages on the homepage. The source code shows that the canonical tags of the site directly search engines to X.com directly instead of doge.gov.
A canonical tag is a fragment of code that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is usually used by sites with multiple pages such as tactics for search engine optimization, to prevent their search ranking from being diluted.
In the case of Doge, however, the code informs search engines that when people search for content that is found on doge.GOV, they should not show those pages in search results, but must display the messages on X instead.
“It promotes the X account as the most important source, with the secondary website,” Declan Chidlow, a web developer, tells Wired. “This is usually not how things are treated and it indicates that the X account is prioritized about the actual website itself.”
All other US government control websites used their own homepage in their canonic tags, including the official website of the White House. When sharing the doge website on mobile devices, the source code also creates a link to the Doge X account instead of the website itself.
“It seems that the doge call site is secondary and that they can do people in the direction of the X account everywhere,” Chidlow adds.
In addition to the home -feed of X -posts, part of doge.gov appears with the “Savings” label now. Until now, the page is empty, except for a single line that reads: “Vouchers that come soon, later than Valentine's Day”, followed by a heart emoji.
A section entitled “Workforce” contains some bar charts that show how many people work in each government agency, with the information from data collected by the Office of Personnel Management in March 2024.
A disclaimer at the bottom of the page is: “This is the attempt of Doge to create an extensive, government-wide org card. This is a huge effort and there are probably some errors or omissions. We will continue to strive for maximum accuracy over time. “
Another section, entitled “Regulations”, contains what Doge calls the “unconstitutional index”, which it describes as “the number of lines of the agency created by non -elected bureaucrats for each law adopted by the congress in 2024.”
