Elon Musk’s DOGE Website Is Already Getting Hacked (2025)

The DOGE website is wide open and vulnerable to hackers, according to reporting from 404 Media. Two coders had already infiltrated the site and left their own messages on it at the time of 404’s reporting on Thursday evening: “THis is a joke of a .gov site,” said one, and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro” said another.

This will be unsurprising to anyone who has visited the DOGE.gov website since its inception—it looks like a high schooler could’ve made it. 404’s Jason Koebler previously referred to it as “just a Wordpress theme placeholder page.”

Anonymous experts told 404 Media that the DOGE.gov website is supported by a Cloudflare page outside of government servers, making it easily accessible to third-party hackers.

“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” one of the sources said. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”

Three senior Justice Department officials resigned Thursday rather than drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

On Monday, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams, claiming that they limited Adams’s ability to help President Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. Apparently, that did not sit well with the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, who opted to resign instead.

After her office refused to drop the charges against Adams, the DOJ then sought to move the case over to the agency’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C., which handles all federal public corruption cases. But then, the section’s acting head, John Keller, left his position rather than drop the charges.

As a result, Adams’s case went to the DOJ’s criminal division, which oversees every federal criminal case in the country. Kevin Driscoll, the division’s acting head, didn’t want to drop the charges either, and he then resigned.

Of all three, Sassoon’s resignation is the most surprising, considering that she has a strong conservative resume. A member of the influential Federalist Society, she once clerked for Supreme Court Justice and conservative stalwart Antonin Scalia. More recently, she captured the national spotlight for prosecuting cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The stunning sequence of events evokes memories of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when President Nixon tried to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was tasked with investigating the infamous Watergate scandal, causing the top two officials in the DOJ to resign instead. It was only the third ranking DOJ official at the time, conservative Robert Bork, who finally agreed to carry out the firing.

The Trump administration appears to be doing Adams a favor for cozying up to the president, ignoring the multiple counts of fraud and bribery against Adams for actions going back to 2014, when he was Brooklyn borough president. It seems that some of the DOJ’s prosecutors can see the corruption coming from on high, even those with right-wing backgrounds.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum threatened Thursday to sue Google after it changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico in its maps, in compliance with Donald Trump’s superficial executive order.

Google announced Tuesday that it had updated the name of the body of water on its maps system, keeping with the standards set by the federal Geographic Names Information System. In the U.S., the name would appear as the inane “Gulf of America”; in Mexico, the “Gulf of Mexico”; and everywhere else would see a monstrous “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).”

During a press conference Thursday, Sheinbaum said that her government had exchanged letters with Google about the issue but that the company had not resolved the complaints.

“Who we have a dispute with is Google,” Sheinbaum said, according to Bloomberg. “If they keep insisting, we’ll consider a lawsuit.”

Sheinbaum argued that Trump’s vanity project could remain but that it needed to be limited to a small section of the gulf, saying that “the only place it was effective was where [the U.S.] has sovereignty, or up to 22 nautical miles from the coast,” according to Reuters.

Donald Trump on Thursday announced his intention to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on America’s trading partners.

Trump instructed his trade advisers and federal agencies to examine “reciprocal tariffs” on a “country-by-country” basis. The tariffs would begin with nations with which the U.S. determines it has the highest trade deficit, according to a senior White House official who spoke with the Financial Times. Trump’s memo likened the U.S. trade deficit to an issue of national security.

“India traditionally is just about the highest country, tariffs,” Trump said in a taped playback that the White House did not allow to be broadcast live from the Oval Office. “They’re at the top of the pack.”

Trump also highlighted what he perceived to be poor trade dynamics with the European Union and Canada, suggesting once again that America’s northern neighbor could become the country’s “fifty-first state” while referring to its outgoing leader as “Governor Trudeau.”

“Whatever they’re charging us, we’ll charge them,” the president said, bringing up Harley Davidson’s manufacturing issues with the country. Trump also promised that “prices will stay the same, go down,” or “go up short-term” as a result of the tariffs, that the nation will see an influx of jobs, and that “farmers will be helped very much.”

“Nobody really knows what will happen,” Trump said.

Trump’s unconfirmed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted that if “they drop their tariffs, prices will go down,” suggesting that nations around the world would drop their tariffs in order to aid American consumers. “It’s a two-way street,” he said.

White House officials said the administration would use a multipronged legal approach to implement the tariffs, in part pointing to Section 301 of the Trade Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Trump initially announced the impending tariff proposal while aboard Air Force One on Sunday, promising that reciprocal tariffs would be coming for “every country” that imposes import duties on U.S. goods.

“Very simply it’s if they charge us, we charge them,” he said, according to NBC News.

The tariffs, which Trump first proposed would go into effect “immediately,” will actually not go into effect for several months. Instead, they have a possible start date of April 1, according to White House officials that spoke with CNBC.

The U.S. has a weighted average import tariff rate of 2 percent on industrial goods, an umbrella category that encompasses practically all consumer goods outside of food.

“Weighted average tariff rates give special consideration to the value of a country’s imports,” reported CNN. “That means that if one country’s exports are subject to tariffs in another country and they constitute a large portion of the country’s overall imports, their weighted average tariff rate will be higher compared to another country whose exports accounts for a small share.”

EU leaders have already vowed to fight back against Trump’s sweeping tariff plan. Although economic advisers have brushed off Trump’s campaign promise as a blunt negotiating strategy, top U.S. allies in Europe have spent months composing a “Trump Task Force” to ready their respective countries for what they believe could boil into a painful trade war.

“I will never support the idea of fighting allies,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters in Brussels on Monday. “But of course, if the U.S. puts tough tariffs on Europe, we need a collective and robust response.”

Trump’s previous tariff proposals are predicted to affect just about every product under the sun, from ground beef and bananas to liquor and gas. On Monday, Trump reinstated his 2018 tariff on steel and aluminum, raising tariffs for both to 25 percent. The new regulation is slated to take effect March 12. Once it does, production costs for America’s automakers are likely to jump, as will costs for the country’s construction industry, which is already struggling to meet the demands of a historic nationwide housing crisis.

Trump has leaned into tariffs as a key component of affording an extension to his 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit. But experts believe that a trade war would be to the overwhelming detriment of American consumers and its allies abroad—and that the self-inflicted pain could only serve to benefit U.S. adversaries around the globe.

Donald Trump announced more than a dozen new additions to the John F. Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees Thursday, shortly after making himself the president of the prestigious performing arts organization.

Trump claimed he had been “unanimously” picked to serve as chairman of the Kennedy Center in a Truth Social post Wednesday, but a source familiar with the vote told CNN that some abstained or voted against his ascension. He had already declared his intention to become the chair last week, as well as his plan to immediately terminate several members of the board.

In a press release from the White House Thursday, Trump announced the list of new additions to the board of trustees, which included White House insiders such as second lady Usha Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Wiles’s mother, Cheri Summerall, and deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino.

Allison Lutnick, the wife of Howard Lutnick, Trump’s soon-to-be confirmed secretary of commerce, and Trump’s presidential personnel office director, Sergio Gor, also earned a spot on the board, according to CNN. Gor had been the one who emailed the ousted Democratic appointees alerting them that their positions had been terminated, The New York Times reported.

Trump also named his ally and former acting director of national intelligence Ric Grenell to serve as the organization’s interim executive director, which is a position that did not exist prior to his appointment.

Trump appointed John Falconetti, Lynda Lomangino, former White House adviser to the first lady Pamela Gross, and megadonors Patricia Duggan and Emilia May Fanjul, as well. Also among the newcomers are Mindy Levine, the wife of New York Yankees president Randy Levine, and Dana Blumberg, the wife of Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

The incoming trustees will replace several Democratic members. The White House announced those include Joe Biden’s former press secretary Karine Jean Pierre, the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee Chris Korge, musician Jonathan Batiste, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Democratic donor Cari Sacks.

There are now 31 members on the board of trustees.