ADogecoin is the cryptocurrency Elon Musk has been promoting through his social-media platform, X. DOGE (department of government efficiency) is a proposed department in the coming Donald Trump government tasked by its two putative co-heads, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to slash and burn the US federal government’s size and spend.
Dogecoin started out as a satirical take on the plethora of crypto-coins in the ether. After Musk began promoting it on X, it became an unintended satire of itself. Dogecoin’s mascot—its meme-face—is a Japanese Shiba Inu dog. DOGE’s mascot—as publicised by Musk and Ramaswamy—is a Shiba Inu dog.
So, right off the bat, we have a conflation of governance and business. The gravitas is missing in the choice of the public interface, but DOGE’s task is one of dead seriousness. Musk made it clear that his single-minded job will be to hack $2 trillion from the federal government’s spending. Since in 2023-24 the federal government spent $6.75 trillion, Musk means to cut its budget by (an impossible) 30 percent.
And, as Ramaswamy gleefully averred last week, Musk aims to take “a chainsaw” to the federal forest of employees—basically, a lumberjack weapon of mass destruction to hack his way through 2.87 million US federal employees, only 15 percent of who are based in Washington DC, with the others spread unevenly through 50 states, packed with nearly 20 million state and local government employees, nearly seven times the federal numbers. This number is not much higher than the lowest figure of 2.7 million in 2014. So, while Musk and Ramaswamy might have taken upon them to thin the ranks of the federal government, how much they might really be able to whittle down is moot.
Although unlikely to be a full-fledged government department—which employ thousands and have to be established by an act of Congress (not an impossible task, because the Republicans have Congress, but which would certainly run against the mandate of cropping the number of government employees)—DOGE is likely to work with the office of management and budget, giving it a semi-official status. Ramaswamy has already announced, long before takeoff, that DOGE will wrap up on July 4, 2026—the 250th anniversary of the declaration of US independence.
So, basically, 18 months to chop and hack through the federal government. What that will leave the Trump administration with is anyone’s guess, but Trump has given DOGE a Popeye MAGA muscularity by metaphorising it with the top-secret WW2 nuke-making Manhattan Project.
This decision to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies" is a political and not economic one: install a small government by uprooting one perceived as big, even though the federal government has not grown in absolute numbers since 1960.
Small government is a libertarian far right ideal . The far right is all about small government and big corporatism—which is why Musk, lurking around Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, is reportedly already dreaming aloud about seeding the Trump administration with his own employees.
But none of these three deforesters is a student of political science . Each is a corporatist. Trump left a government in a shambles of desiccated departments and agencies and stupefying misappointments when he was defeated by Biden in 2020. Musk fired thousands of employees after he took over Twitter (and saw moderation spiral into a tsunami of disinformation, trolling and doxing) and has bombastically promised to “send shockwaves through the system”. Ramaswamy, while running for president last year, threatened to fire over 75 percent of the federal workforce and shut down major agencies including the Department of Education, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
These men are berserkers, unlikely to be aware that no big country in the world has ever been headed by a small government. A great many political scientists consider it impossible. A government invested so congenitally overseas as America’s, with 27 percent of federal employees in defence and international relations, can never be small. It cannot become noticeably smaller even if, as Trumpism trumpets, it will be belaboured from within to take up less space in the political geosphere.
But small countries can also employ more people in government: the share of government employment in northern European nations ranges from 25-30 percent. In comparison, the US figure has stayed at roughly 15 percent.
It can be argued that democracy comes intact with big government. Prior to the Russian revolution, the tsarist bureaucracy was tiny: 4 chinovniki per 1,000 people. In contrast, Britain had 7.3 bureaucrats per 1,000, Germany had 12.6, France had 17.6. Lenin gave Russia a humongous bureaucracy within two years after the revolution, but, today, the numbers, including the siloviki (law enforcement and security personnel, and the military bureaucracy) are reportedly down to fewer than 500,000.
So, in the search for a small fistful of government , what will this clueless triad cut and clip? From which departments? In 2023, of the federal government’s total outlay of $6.1 trillion, 62 percent was mandatory spending, and 28 percent was discretionary. Of discretionary spending, non-defence spending comprises only about 15 percent.
As Ekaterina Schulmann wrote in Carnegie Politika, “Personalist regimes tend to dismantle, subvert, or imitate institutions with the sole aim of consolidating power in the hands of a leader and his… closest associates.” That’s what this is about.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)