'Experts left database open': Hackers mock Elon Musk after easily defacing his DOGE sit

A pair of unidentified hackers are taking a victory lap after they successfully defaced the website for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

What's more, they tell 404 Media that anyone with sufficient knowledge of coding can do the same.

As the hackers explained to 404 Media, the DOGE website "is insecure and pulls from a database" called Cloudflare Pages "that can be edited by anyone," which allowed them to post visible entries on the DOGE database that read "this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”

404 Media notes that the DOGE website was slapped together quickly after Musk told reporters that his department was providing maximum transparency in his efforts to unilaterally and illegally shut down entire government agencies whose funding had been approved by Congress.

Tech news website The Verge adds some context to the 404 Media report by writing that the DOGE website blunder "establishes a poor track record for the White House’s website administration practices" as "on Wednesday, the newly created waste.gov site was hidden and locked down after it was found to be mostly displaying an unedited WordPress template."

Elite lawyers, a ketamine company worker and young software engineers are part of the team tasked with trimming the federal government.

“We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes,” Musk said Tuesday, adding that “we will fix the mistakes very quickly.”

But who is “we?”

Musk asserted that no “organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization,” a commission President Donald Trump established within the White House, but neither Musk nor Trump officials have provided much public information about DOGE’s structure, operations or workforce.

DOGE staff member Katie Miller referred questions to the White House. White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement provided by email that its work falls under the Presidential Records Act, which shields presidential records from public disclosure until five years after the president leaves office. Fields declined to respond to detailed questions.

DOGE’s work “aligns with its purpose to advise and assist the President on how to make government more efficient,” Fields said.

The Washington Post assembled the following list of people who work in connection with DOGE, as well as Musk allies who now control key nerve centers in Washington. Much about them remains unknown: exact titles, precise roles — in some cases, even which agencies they work for. The list reflects available information, including ties to Musk, if any.

These workers were identified through agency records obtained by The Post and interviews with at least a dozen federal workers who shared details of their interactions. The Post then scoured public records and social media profiles to learn more about them and attempted to contact them directly or through their workplaces.

Amanda Scales came from Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, where she worked for a few months in recruiting. Previously, she worked in talent acquisition at Uber, according to her LinkedIn profile, and the venture capital firm Human Capital, which was co-founded by Musk ally Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist.

Brian Bjelde is a veteran SpaceX human resources executive. Bjelde was one of several leaders at Musk companies sued by former Twitter workers for allegedly neglecting to make severance payments after they were fired when Musk bought the social media company. The lawsuit is ongoing.

Stephen Duarte has worked in human resources for SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn.

Christina Hanna has worked as a senior manager for human resources at SpaceX for almost nine years, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Bryanne-Michelle Mlodzianowski has worked as an HR director at SpaceX, according to her LinkedIn.

General Services Administration

Independent agency that provides support, supplies and office space to federal agencies, now a hub for Musk’s efforts to corral federal technology and shed government real estate. The director of the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services unit, a Musk ally and Tesla alumnus, has described those staffers as “Swiss army knives” who can work across agencies.

The Post was able to identify two DOGE allies at the agency:

Stephen Ehikian previously worked in Silicon Valley, including at Salesforce. He also co-founded a company, Airkit.ai, which used artificial intelligence to create customer service agents for e-commerce companies.

Thomas Shedd spent eight years working at Tesla as a software engineer.

Treasury Department

Cabinet-level agency that manages the nation’s finances, including collecting taxes and making more than $5 trillion in payments annually.

Tom Krause is a Musk ally and the chief executive of Cloud Software Group, a holding company that resulted from a private-equity transaction combining Citrix and TIBCO, two software companies. He told his employees in early February that he would keep his job at the company even as he works at Treasury, according to an email the company shared with The Post. He oversees Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), replacing veteran civil servant David A. Lebryk, who resigned after a dispute with Musk surrogates, including Krause, over access to sensitive payment systems.

Marko Elez was a DOGE staffer at the Treasury Department who gained access to the sensitive BFS payment systems. He resigned in February after the Wall Street Journal linked him to a social media account that had made racist posts. Musk has said he will be rehired.

Other agencies

Federal agencies have a DOGE team lead to “advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President’s DOGE Agenda,” according to the executive order that established DOGE in January. Here are a few advisers whom The Post has identified within agencies, though it is unclear whether they are team leads.

Nate Cavanaugh, an adviser to Shedd at GSA, is an entrepreneur who has founded multiple start-ups. He co-founded intellectual property management start-up Brainbase at the age of 19 before dropping out of Indiana University, according to a 2021 Forbes “30 Under 30” profile. His LinkedIn page lists him as co-founder and chairman of FlowFi, an accounting software company.

Justin Fulcher, adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is an entrepreneur and the co-founder of RingMD, a digital health-care platform.

Scott Langmack is a senior adviser at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides housing assistance for the poor and oversees national housing policy. Langmack previously worked as the chief operating officer of Kukun, an AI-powered property technology platform for homeowners and real estate investors, according to his LinkedIn.

U.S. DOGE Service

Body established within the Executive Office of the President to house Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, known as the Department of Government Efficiency. It replaces the U.S. Digital Service, which was launched by President Barack Obama.

Key officials at DOGE

Steve Davis is president of Musk’s tunneling company, Boring Co. He is one of Musk’s most trusted deputies and oversaw cost-cutting at the social media platform Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and renamed X.

Brad Smith is a health-care entrepreneur and Rhodes Scholar who served in Trump’s first administration as head of the office devoted to Medicare and Medicaid innovations.

Katie Miller served as press secretary and communications director for former vice president Mike Pence. She is also the wife of Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Though she previously fielded media requests for DOGE, Miller said in a text Wednesday that she doesn’t do communications.

Engineers at DOGE

Alexandra “Aly” Beynon is a former Goldman Sachs engineer who recently worked at Mindbloom, her husband’s start-up for at-home ketamine therapy.

Riccardo Biasini has worked as an engineering director at the Boring Co.

Akash Bobba is an engineer who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, according to CNN and Wired, and interned at Meta and Palantir. A former classmate, recounting a blunder in which he deleted crucial computer code during a project, said Bobba stepped in and “rewrote everything from scratch in one night — better than before.” “I trust him with everything I own,” he wrote on X.

Edward Coristine worked briefly for Musk’s brain chip start-up Neuralink and is now posted to agencies including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Known online as “Big Balls,” Coristine has attracted widespread attention, including for his reported firing from a previous job at a cybersecurity firm for allegedly leaking company information to a competitor, detailed in a Bloomberg News story.

Luke Farritor attended the University of Nebraska and was the cowinner of a prestigious $700,000 prize for decoding a Roman scroll.

Gautier “Cole” Killian studied math and computer science at McGill University and recently worked at Jump Trading, an algorithmic financial trading firm.

Gavin Kliger is a software engineer and one of the DOGE employees involved in shutting down USAID. Kliger is now working at the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of DOGE, with the title of “senior adviser to the acting IRS commissioner,” according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details. His LinkedIn previously stated that until January he worked as a senior software engineer at Databricks, an AI-focused data software firm. He worked briefly at Twitter in 2019, before Musk bought the platform. Kliger also said on his LinkedIn profile that he is a now “senior adviser to the director for technology and delivery” at the Office of Personnel Management. His LinkedIn profile appears to have been recently taken offline.

Nikhil Rajpal has focused on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Wired. Before joining the DOGE effort, he worked for Twitter (before Musk’s acquisition) and did design work for Tesla, the publication said. “As an undergraduate, Rajpal was the leader of a libertarian-aligned student group advocating for ‘minimal government, free markets, sound money, nonintervention, and maximum individual liberty,’” Wired reported.

Ethan Shaotran attended Harvard University and was a runner-up in a hackathon run by xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company.

Christopher Stanley has worked at both X and SpaceX in security engineering, according to his LinkedIn profile. In a past role, he worked on technical infrastructure for the state of Kentucky. On his X account, Stanley has posted about helping to release the pardoned Jan. 6 rioters. And he wrote last week: “We should do a “Daily DOGE” of all the insane stuff being cut. Would be epic.”

Jordan Wick attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then worked as a software engineer at Waymo, a self-driving-car company.

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Lawyers at DOGE

James Burnham is a former Jones Day attorney who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. More recently, Burnham founded a firm that invests in litigation, called Vallecito Capital.

Keenan Kmiec is a lawyer who clerked for Samuel A. Alito Jr. when the Supreme Court justice was a federal judge. He also clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Kmiec ran his own law firm for 10 years with a partner, which worked on insider-trading litigation. Afterward, he worked with crypto and non-fungible tokens, serving as chief executive of a now-shuttered NFT start-up.

Noah Peters is an attorney who worked at the Federal Labor Relations Authority. It says on his LinkedIn profile that he has worked since January as a senior adviser at OPM.

Others at DOGE

Anthony Armstrong has worked as vice chairman for investment banking at Morgan Stanley and is the former director of the U.S. Ski Mountaineering Association.

Jennifer Balajadia works closely with Musk as a top assistant and has been a manager at his tunneling company, Boring Co.

Stephanie Holmes started her own consulting firm, BrighterSideHR, according to 404 Media, which identified her as a DOGE staffer. She is an attorney who has represented employers in labor cases. Holmes has worked with Philanthropy Roundtable on its True Diversity initiative, including writing a paper stating that “DEI may be creating legal liability for companies and having a counterproductive impact on work environments.”

Adam Ramada has been identified as a Miami venture capital investor by Business Insider.

Chris Young is described by the New York Times as a political strategist who recently worked at the trade organization PhRMA and previously worked for the Republican National Committee. The National Treasury Employees Union said in a court filing that he was recently added to the staff directory of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.