Amid their energetic vandalism spree across the federal government, the White House and Elon Musk’s DOGE team have focused special and virulent attention on the ideas that “waste” must be curbed, and that diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts must be eliminated.
As Reuters reported earlier this month, on February 4, the White House registered two new .gov websites, dei.gov and waste.gov, likely meant to boast progress in achieving these goals. But now, a full week later, dei.gov only redirects to waste.gov—which displays an empty WordPress template theme advertising a fake architecture firm.
Reuters’ Raphael Satter was the first to report the sites’ registration, which were first spotted by Alexander Urbelis, an attorney who monitors the Domain Name System, a key piece of internet infrastructure. The government’s domain lookup system shows both sites were created on February 4 by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.
Waste.gov is, per a tagline on the bottom of the page, dedicated to “Tracking government waste.” At the moment, however, Waste.gov is itself total trash. Apart from the tagline, it shows no other signs of having been edited, and still appears at first glance to be a website for an entirely fake “pioneering firm” called Études.
While this might be confusing for Americans looking for information on how tax dollars are purportedly being spent to reduce waste, it’s probably more confusing for companies actually called Études, which include a Belgian architecture firm and a Parisian fashion brand.
Another note at the bottom of the page shows that the site was designed with WordPress, but it’s unclear whether the site complies with federally mandated web design standards, or will in the future. Among other things, those standards are meant to ensure that sites are accessible to people with disabilities, clearly describe the government agency or product they’re representing, and are usable on mobile devices.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller.
On Tuesday, while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Musk claimed he was working “to be as transparent as possible,” including by posting a record of DOGE’s actions to its website. But the DOGE website also remains almost completely blank, apart from the name of the agency, a note that it is an official government website, and one sentence: “The people voted for major reform.”
Update, February 12: Moments after publication, the waste.gov homepage became password-protected and inaccessible to the public.
