It’s official: Elon Musk has been given a cabinet position. He is teaming up with failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with downsizing the government. It is only fitting, therefore, that this position would have two co-chairs.
Trump described this effort as essential to his administration’s goal of “saving America” and likened it to a significant historical initiative, calling it “the Manhattan Project of our time” in terms of its potential impact. How cutting a government is in any way comparable to the creation of nuclear weapons is anyone’s guess.
A new government ministry is always of note, with the naming of this one particularly so. The abbreviation of the new department being ‘DOGE’ is not an accident; it is undoubtedly a link to Elon Musk’s claim to be the “Meme Lord”, skin-crawlingly cringe for a 53-year-old person to say.
Doge is a more-than-a-decade-old meme surrounding a Japanese dog, which was appropriated into a cryptocurrency.
What is Doge the dog?
Doge the dog is actually a Shiba Inu named Kabosu. Born in Japan, Kabosu became famous after a photograph taken in 2010 was transformed into the “Doge” meme, which gained immense popularity in 2013.
The meme features Kabosu’s expressive face alongside captions written in Comic Sans font, using broken English to convey its thoughts, such as “Much wow” and “So amaze”.
The internet meme was central to the creation of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency launched in December 2013 that leveraged the Doge meme for branding. Elon Musk has been a strong proponent of Dogecoin with the cryptocurrency trebling in value since the election.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, former Republican presidential candidate and Strive Asset Management co-founder, will lead the department, Trump said in a statement. Together, they “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Memecoins are seen as a gauge of retail interest and risk appetite in crypto. When memecoin activity ramps up, it usually indicates that retail investors are participating and have an appetite to speculate further out on the risk curve.
Trump initially floated the idea of an efficiency commission in September. Since then, Musk — who has called himself the “Dogefather” in the past and has been known to make public comments about the memecoin that influences its price — has posted on his social media platform X, referring to the commission as the “Department of Government Efficiency” or “D.O.G.E.”
Dogecoin gained relevance in 2021 following Musk’s endorsement and continuous hype on social media, which has since become a big catalyst for the coin. In May of that year, Musk’s posts fueled dogecoin’s rally to its all-time high of 67 cents, per Coin Metrics. Though his appearance at the time on SNL, in which he called dogecoin “a hustle,” sent its price crashing down.
When they accidentally seat you in first class 🤫 pic.twitter.com/TeGt6cxni4
— Dogecoin (@dogecoin) November 13, 2024