To one Press conference at the Oval Office This week, Elon Musk promised the actions of his so-called Government Department (DOGE) The project would be “maximum transparent”, thanks to the information published on its website.
At the time of his comment, the The Doge website was empty. However, when the site finally put online on Thursday morning, it turned out to be a little more than a glorified flow of messages from the official DOGE account on the own Musk platform, raising new questions on Musk Conflicts of interest to run Doge.
Doge.gov claims to be an “official website of the American government”, but rather than giving detailed breakdowns of cost savings and the efficiency that Musk claims that his project realizes, the home page of the site has just reproduced DOGE publications on x.
A wired examination of the source code of the page shows that the promotion of the Musk’s own platform went deeper than reproducing messages on the home page. The source code shows that the site Canonical tags Direct search engines to X.com rather than Doge.gov.
A canonical tag is an extract of code that indicates to the search engines which is the version of a website. It is generally used by sites with several pages as a search engine optimization tactic, to prevent their search ranking from being diluted.
In the case of DOGE, however, the code informs search engines that when people are looking for content found on DOGE.GOV, they should not display these pages in the search results, but should instead display publications on X.
“He promotes the X account as a main source, with the secondary website”, Declan Chidlow, A web developersaid wired. “This is generally not that things are managed, and it indicates that the X account is a priority on the website itself.”
All other Wired US government websites have used their own home page in their canonical labels, including the official White House website. In addition, 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 push people in the direction of the X account wherever they can,” adds Chidlow.
In addition to the X post home page flow, a section of DOGE.GOV labeled “savings” now appears. Until now, the page is empty except for a single line that can be read An emoji of heart.
A section entitled “Workforce” includes bar graphics showing how many people work in each government agency, the information from data collected by the staff management office in March 2024.
A warning at the bottom of the page is read is a huge effort, and there are probably some errors or omissions. We will continue to seek maximum precision over time. »»
Another section, entitled “Regulation”, presents what Doge calls “the unconstitutionality index”, which it describes as “the number of agency rules created by bureaucrats not elected for each law adopted by the congress in 2024. “
