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Remember Doge, aka the Department of Government Efficiency? You know, the pseudo federal agency dreamt up by Elon Musk and named after a memecoin that was going to cut trillions of dollars from America’s budget and drastically shrink the administrative state? It emerged this week that the head of the US government’s human resources office had given an interesting answer to reporters asking about the current status of Doge: “That doesn’t exist.”
Alas, it seems Doge has had its day. The grand bureaucracy-bashing, waste-walloping programme was due to keep running as a “temporary organisation” until July 2026, as set out in Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year, but it appears to have been quietly disbanded ahead of schedule. Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor told Reuters that Doge was no longer a “centralised entity” and that his office had taken over many of Doge’s functions.
“As usual, this is fake news from Reuters,” Doge’s official account posted on X after the story had broken, carrying on vaguely in a distinctly non-denying-denial: “President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to modernise the federal government and reduce waste, fraud and abuse . . . We’ll be back in a few days with our regularly scheduled Friday update.” Reader, there was no update. The official Doge website says it was last updated on October 4, with the most recent “latest work” listed having taken place in August.
It had all seemed so simple. More than that, it had all seemed so hilarious. Here was a real-life government department (well not officially, but it was called that in the title and that’s what mattered) whose initials spelled out the letters of the most hysterical memecoin of all time, the one that was invented as a joke and that Musk had for many years declared as his “favourite cryptocurrency”.
The self-proclaimed Dogefather himself was now literally the Doge father (he was never officially the head of the Department of Government Efficiency but Trump spoke of him as such). The president? A former reality TV star whose rise to the top of US politics had been predicted in an episode of the Simpsons, and who claimed that the last election had been stolen from him. Lol! You couldn’t make it up. Well actually you could — if you were a satirical comedy writer. Lolol!!
Was Musk just doing it for the lulz? It wasn’t entirely clear. It was all just too good — almost too good to be true, and the funniest thing of all was that it was true. We had seemed to have entered a brave and magical new world in which the boundaries between reality and unreality had become totally blurred; in which the truth could be whatever you said it was.
And nowhere was this detachment from reality clearer than in the world of crypto, a world in which an unlimited number of tokens (CoinMarketCap currently tracks more than 27mn of them) could be worth something the moment they were digitally created, their “value” deriving from nothing other than sheer belief. The president and the first lady were up for some financially motivated lols, too, each launching their own memecoin — $TRUMP and $MELANIA respectively — on the eve of Trump’s inauguration.
Now, it is always unwise to read too much into the wild gyrations of crypto, but it has fallen substantially over the past two months, with bitcoin suffering its worst crash since 2022. If you are to take the crypto “market cap” seriously (I don’t, but it’s the only gauge we have), more than a trillion dollars has been wiped out since early October — about a quarter of the market’s value. And this comes despite the US president’s full-throated support of it (not to mention entanglement in it) and swaths of institutional investors who now insist this is a serious asset class.
Crypto is not, and never was, a serious asset class. And what we are seeing in these wobbles is a gradual move away from the era of lol that has defined the years since Trump became president for the first time. It was, after all, during his first year in office in 2017 that ICO-mania took off, allowing chancers to raise millions of dollars for dubious, often non-existent projects via “initial coin offerings”.
We see the shift playing out politically too. Marjorie Taylor Greene has stopped talking about “Jewish space lasers” and claims not to believe in QAnon at all anymore. The current favourite to be the next US president, JD Vance, could not provide any lols if he tried. It turned out you couldn’t win an election on the basis of a “Brat summer”. It suddenly feels like the lols aren’t landing. That joke isn’t funny any more.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
