DOGE Begins Publishing Data After Transparency Complaints
After Elon Musk promised "maximum transparency," the DOGE's website posted organizational charts of federal agencies and statistics on the federal work force.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began publishing data on federal agencies yesterday after questions and complaints arose about the office's transparency.
As of now, the DOGE website contains social media posts from its X account; aggregate work force data about federal agencies' head counts, wages, and subordinate offices; and statistics on federal regulations.
The website promises to release information on DOGE's much-touted savings to taxpayers "no later than Valentine's day."
The website also incorporates an "Unconstitutionality Index" created by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank. The index, which CEI began in 2003, compares the number of rules issued by federal agencies to the number of laws passed by Congress every year.
The summary statistics and organizational chart are a first step in making DOGE's work, and the federal government's work, more open to the public, although much more is needed. Reducing federal spending and increasing government efficiency are both directionally correct goals, but those efforts should be subject to the same sunshine that Musk says he is bringing to wasteful offices, so the public can see for themselves and fact-check Musk's grandiose, shifting claims.
DOGE deserves some credit for simply trying to map the federal government—a gargantuan endeavor that involves over 100 agencies, each a matryoshka doll of sub-agencies and offices. As former federal technology officer Marina Nitze wrote in Reason today, the amount of nonsensical rules, regulations, and turf battles means it's a Sisyphean struggle to make even the most basic improvements to federal websites and tech systems. Federal agencies may not like getting shredded by Musk's landscaping crew, but they had decades to do things like modernize their websites, fix the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and get their houses in order.
There have been troubling discrepancies between what Musk and President Donald Trump say about government transparency and what they're doing, though.
"There should be no need for FOIA requests," Musk declared last November. "All government data should be default public for maximum transparency."
Yet The New York Times reported Monday that the Trump White House had declared records produced and received by DOGE to be presidential records, in effect shielding them from FOIA requests.
Trump's decisions to fire inspectors general and positions like the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower complaints, have likewise not done much to convince skeptics that his administration is engaged in a good-faith effort to root out government corruption and waste, rather than ensuring that a new group of cronies are benefiting from that corruption and waste.
At a White House press conference Tuesday, Musk said, "We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible, so all of our actions are maximally transparent. I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization."
At the time, DOGE's website was just an empty placeholder. Later that afternoon, data started appearing on the website.
