Waste.gov: The Trump-Musk Experiment in Government Efficiency—Powered by WordPress and Panic

It was inevitable. A government website dedicated to exposing wasteful spending was itself a monument to waste—a broken, glitch-ridden disaster of such stunning incompetence that it could only have been birthed in the Trump-Musk era of American decline. Waste.gov, a site meant to track inefficiency, was revealed to be nothing more than an unedited WordPress template, complete with placeholder text about a fake French architecture firm named Études. Within hours of its exposure, the entire thing was locked behind a password wall, as if the administration could simply delete its own humiliation like a misspelled tweet.

This is the kind of raw, undistilled idiocy that makes you wonder if we are even living in a real country anymore or if the entire government has been replaced by a bunch of billionaires on Adderall playing SimCity with taxpayer money.

Act One: The Garbage Fire Begins

Let’s start with the premise—because, on paper, this should have been an easy layup. The Trump administration, fresh off another round of deep-state purges and frat-boy authoritarianism, wanted a website to highlight government waste. They had Musk—America’s favorite hype-man-turned-digital-arsonist—leading the charge under the newly christened Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Yes, they literally named a federal agency after a dead meme.

Now, most functioning adults would take at least five minutes to ensure that a government website does not, in fact, look like it was assembled in a crack house at 3 a.m. by a high schooler rushing to submit his overdue homework. But that’s not how things work in the Year of Our Lord 2025. Instead, the site launched in all its horrifying glory, with zero content and a default WordPress theme from a free template.

It gets better. Waste.gov didn’t just fail in its core mission—it actually advertised a completely fictional architecture firm that claimed to “seamlessly merge creativity and functionality.” Not one person in the government stopped to delete the placeholder text. Not a single intern. Not a rogue IT guy. Nothing.

This is what happens when you let Elon Musk run a government department. The same man who rebranded Twitter to "X" with all the grace of a meth-fueled raccoon is now in charge of federal efficiency.

Act Two: The Swift and Terrible Downfall

Predictably, the internet noticed.

Reporters at 404 Media were the first to expose the whole mess, and within minutes, the site became a laughingstock. Twitter (excuse me, X, because we live in Hell) erupted with mockery. The Department of Government Efficiency had just committed one of the worst self-owns in federal history, and instead of rolling out their brilliant new plan to eliminate waste, they had just delivered the digital equivalent of a wet fart in a conference room.

The administration’s response? Panic.

In a desperate attempt to contain the humiliation, they immediately locked the site behind a password wall. Imagine trying to defend a bank robbery by shoving a curtain over the security footage. That’s the level of strategy we’re dealing with.

And it just kept getting worse.

Trump, in his never-ending jihad against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, had recently passed an executive order banning DEI language from government websites. But, because Waste.gov was just a lazy copy-paste job from WordPress, it still contained a reference to a “diverse clientele.”

So in the span of 24 hours, the administration exposed its own incompetence, violated its own policies, and then tried to memory-hole the entire thing like a Soviet propaganda minister with a broken shredder.

Act Three: Elon Musk, Master of Disaster

Naturally, the one man who should have had something to say about this—Elon Musk—was nowhere to be found.

Oh, he made a statement. A classic Muskism, dripping with self-assurance and vague techno-babble:

“We actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.”

Which, in Musk-speak, means “I have no idea what’s happening, but I will say something vaguely futuristic so my fanboys eat it up.”

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency can’t even build a working website, yet we’re supposed to believe he’s going to streamline the entire federal bureaucracy. The DOGE homepage, much like Musk’s promises of self-driving cars and Mars colonies, contains zero useful information. Just a meaningless slogan about “major reform,” which could mean anything or nothing at all. Musk himself has yet to even acknowledge the fiasco on his own social media, as if ignoring it will somehow erase the sheer incompetence on display.

Act Four: The Cover-Up and the Climax of Stupidity

With Waste.gov now sealed behind digital quarantine, the administration is doing what it does best: pretending it never happened.

No official word on whether the site will return. No plan for a relaunch. Just silence, as if locking the door on their own failure will somehow make everyone forget what’s inside.

Meanwhile, the whole fiasco raises an unavoidable question—was this just an isolated screw-up, or is this the best we can expect from a government now run by a reality TV host and a billionaire whose greatest skill is convincing people he knows what he’s doing? If this is the future of federal efficiency, we’re in trouble. Not just because the website was a disaster, but because the same reckless, slapdash approach defines every move this administration makes. Big talk, sloppy execution, and an inevitable retreat the moment the con is exposed.

Waste.gov wasn’t just a failed website. It was a preview of what’s to come. A government run on half-baked ideas, rushed rollouts, and a blind belief that as long as they say the right things, no one will notice nothing is actually working.

A few years ago, we thought government by Twitter poll and meme stock was a joke. Now, we’re living in it, and the only thing running efficiently is the grift.