- Aug 3, 2012
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So much for maximal transparency, eh?
www.nytimes.com
Previously when it posted new claims, DOGE, Mr. Musk’s government-restructuring effort, had included identifying details about the cuts it took credit for. That allowed the public to fact-check its work by comparing its figures with federal spending databases and talking to the groups whose funding had been cut.
This time, it did not include those details. A White House official said that was done for security purposes.
The result was that the group’s new claims appeared impossible to check.
The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code. The Times used those numbers to match DOGE’s claims with reality, and to discover that they contained the same kind of errors that it had made in the past.
Mr. Musk’s group later removed those identifiers from the code, and posted more batches of claims that could not be verified at all.
DOGE Makes Its Latest Errors Harder to Find
Elon Musk’s group obscured the details of some new claims on its website, despite promises of transparency. But The Times was still able to detect another batch of mistakes.
Previously when it posted new claims, DOGE, Mr. Musk’s government-restructuring effort, had included identifying details about the cuts it took credit for. That allowed the public to fact-check its work by comparing its figures with federal spending databases and talking to the groups whose funding had been cut.
This time, it did not include those details. A White House official said that was done for security purposes.
The result was that the group’s new claims appeared impossible to check.
The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code. The Times used those numbers to match DOGE’s claims with reality, and to discover that they contained the same kind of errors that it had made in the past.
Mr. Musk’s group later removed those identifiers from the code, and posted more batches of claims that could not be verified at all.
