February 15, 2025
It started, as these things always do, with great, thundering proclamations. The Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE, because of course it has a dumb meme name—was Elon Musk’s latest fever-dream of techno-autocracy, a grand experiment in proving that the best and brightest (meaning: easily manipulated Stanford dropouts with standing-desk-induced scoliosis) could run the government better than the stodgy, slow-moving, clipboard-carrying civil servants who had the audacity to demand things like oversight, security, and basic competence.
“No more government bloat,” they said!
“No more inefficient agencies!”
Instead, we would get a streamlined, data-driven, ultra-efficient governing body, built like a Silicon Valley startup—which, as it turns out, meant slapping together a barely functional website, forgetting to set database permissions, and then, for good measure, publishing classified national security data for the entire planet to see.
Yes. This is Musk’s meritocracy in action: a government run like a freshman computer science group project—except somehow stupider.
A Publicly Editable Government Website, Because Why Not?
The first sign that something was amiss—aside from the very existence of this monstrosity—was the fact that DOGE.gov was built with all the security consciousness of a diary left open on a park bench.
Somewhere, in the breathless haste to launch, Musk’s hand-picked elite team of software engineers—most of whom seem to have been selected based on their ability to call other people “NPCs” in Twitter arguments—forgot one teeny, tiny thing.
They left their database open.
Not just a little open. Not in some oh-whoops-we-forgot-to-restrict-this-one-endpoint kind of way. No, this was a publicly writable, full-access, no-permissions-needed, the-door’s-wide-open-and-we-left-cookies-out-for-you level of open.
As in: any random citizen with an internet connection could waltz in and edit a U.S. government website like it was a Wikipedia page about their favorite Pokémon.
Naturally, the internet did what the internet does best.
Within hours, a few enterprising pranksters tested the security (or lack thereof) and promptly defaced the website, leaving behind messages that might as well have been scrawled in crayon:
"THIS IS A JOKE OF A .GOV SITE."
"THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN. - roro”
Which, let’s be honest, is a more accurate piece of government transparency than DOGE has provided so far.
Spilling National Security Secrets Like a Drunk Intern
Now, a hackable government website is bad enough. But in a true feat of transcendent idiocy, DOGE’s team also somehow managed to upload classified intelligence data to their circus tent of a website.
Specifically, they accidentally leaked the classified personnel data and budget of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)—a spy agency so secretive that most Americans don’t even know it exists.
For the uninitiated, the NRO is the shadowy government office that builds and maintains U.S. spy satellites. It is not the kind of organization that typically enjoys having its headcount and spending habits published on a website so badly secured that even a kid with an old Chromebook could deface it.
But lo and behold, there it was: the budget and staffing details of a top-secret U.S. intelligence agency, dumped onto the internet like the world’s dumbest Wikileaks drop.
One can only imagine the sheer, blistering panic inside the Pentagon when someone glanced at DOGE.gov and realized that, oh, I don’t know, America’s satellite surveillance capabilities were just made available to every foreign adversary with Google access.
"People are scrambling to check if their info has been accessed," an anonymous Defense Intelligence Agency official muttered to reporters, presumably while clutching their head in their hands and seriously reconsidering their career choices.
And yet, somehow, this wasn’t even the funniest part.
Just when you thought the DOGE website couldn’t possibly be more of a slapstick farce—when its gaping security hole had already been exploited by internet randos, when it had been reduced to a glorified Musk social media reposting machine, when it had already established itself as the drunk uncle of .gov domains—it somehow managed to publish classified intelligence data.
Now, in fairness, let’s take a moment to appreciate what an extraordinary achievement this is.
Most people, in the course of their professional lives, will never be in a position to accidentally leak top-secret defense information onto a publicly writable database. This takes a special kind of talent. The kind of talent that talks about “disrupting bureaucracy” in TED Talks but doesn’t know what an API key is.
Oops, We Leaked the Spy Budget!
Let’s be clear about what just happened: The National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) classified budget and personnel data was just uploaded, un-redacted, to a website that had already been hacked multiple times.
The NRO, for those unfamiliar, is the kind of intelligence agency that doesn’t officially exist in most government documents. The fact that their headcount and funding are supposed to be classified is not a formality. It’s actual, real-world spycraft. And yet, here it is, on the Musk-run website that was seemingly built in a weekend by underpaid contractors and a teenager who goes by the name ‘Big Balls.’
This data is labeled NOFORN—Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals. But as of this moment, anyone with a smartphone—including, say, every foreign national on planet Earth—could just waltz onto DOGE.gov and download the operational details of a classified intelligence agency.
Scramble Mode: Engaged!
Cue the Defense Department collectively soiling itself.
According to people inside the Pentagon, intelligence officials are currently scrambling to assess how much damage has been done. Which raises an important question:
Why is the U.S. military now operating in “scramble mode” because of a website that is supposedly about “government efficiency”?!
The very people Musk’s administration was supposedly cutting as “bureaucratic bloat” are now the ones who have to spend their weekend damage-controlling a national security leak caused by, oh, let’s say a bunch of hubristic Y Combinator washouts who thought using AWS was too old-school.
Meritocracy in Action: A Masterclass in Failing Up
DOGE was supposed to be about pure, unadulterated meritocracy—a government run like a tech startup, where the best and brightest would replace those stodgy old civil servants. And yet, here we are:
Career government employees are running disaster response drills to contain a leak caused by Musk’s team of extremely online failsons.
A website literally hacked by pranksters just somehow gained access to classified intelligence data.
The White House refuses to comment, because what are they going to say? “Yes, this was entirely intentional, and no, we don’t know how to fix it.”
This is the exact opposite of meritocracy. If anything, this is the greatest living argument for the existence of qualified government employees. Because guess who never accidentally uploaded classified intelligence data onto a website with zero security?
Every. other. administration.
Say what you will about the federal bureaucracy, but up until this exact moment in history, they managed to avoid turning a national security intelligence database into an editable Google Sheet.
Even SpaceX Should Be Embarrassed
And the funniest part? Musk’s own company, SpaceX, has a $1.8 billion contract with the NRO. So you’d think—maybe, just maybe—someone over at DOGE would have realized that this is an intelligence agency Musk directly does business with and not the kind of thing you want to casually dump onto the internet like a recipe blog.
But no.
Instead, we got a data breach so avoidable, so humiliating, that it actually eclipses the original disaster of allowing the public to edit a .gov website.
Where Did They Even Get This Data?!
Now the real question looms: Where did DOGE’s team even get this classified information?
Because the possibilities here are truly terrifying:
They hacked into federal databases they weren’t supposed to have access to and accidentally leaked classified info because they don’t know what they’re doing.
They were given access by someone inside the government who also doesn’t know what they’re doing.
They scraped it from somewhere without realizing it was classified, because they fundamentally do not understand what they’re doing.
All three of these possibilities are catastrophic failures of judgment and basic security protocol.
And remember: these are the very people who are supposed to be making the government more efficient.
Thoughts on UX
A personal note, as someone who actually knows a thing or two about designing functional systems:
If your website:
can be hacked by script kiddies in under a week
accidentally leaks classified intelligence data
causes the entire Pentagon to go into crisis mode
is literally being run by people whose biggest career achievement is moderating an Elon Musk fan forum
… then congratulations! You have just failed at every single possible goal you set out to achieve.
At this point, DOGE’s entire website needs to be taken down, burned, and the hard drives thrown into the sea. The mere fact that it exists is an insult to not just good government but to basic product design, UX, and common sense.
And yet, here we are, watching in real time as the techno-libertarian fantasy of a lean, mean, tech-run government collapses under the weight of its own breathtaking incompetence.
This is government by GitHub issue queue, governance as a Discord mod power trip, efficiency measured in retweets and rapid-fire layoffs.
Musk promised a meritocracy. Instead, we got a security catastrophe run by a bunch of arrogant dolts whose biggest accomplishment so far is getting ratio’d on Twitter.
Meritocracy my ass.
So, What Now?
The lawsuits are flying, intelligence officials are scrambling, and the internet continues to delight in the sheer, undiluted spectacle of what happens when a man who named his child X Æ A-12 decides he should also be in charge of the federal workforce.
And what of Mr. Musk?
He’s doing what he always does: calling critics “NPCs” and pretending that none of this is his fault.
At the end of the day, DOGE has given us one undeniable truth:
The only thing more inefficient than the U.S. government is Elon Musk trying to run the U.S. government.
So here’s to the brilliant minds of DOGE, the self-anointed saviors of bureaucracy, who have managed, in a matter of days, to prove that MAGA meritocracy is a scam, tech exceptionalism is a joke, and the only thing moving fast in this administration is classified data—straight out the door.
Story and Music Copyright © 2025 by Paul Henry Smith
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