The Terminally Online are now in charge

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

The announcements of Donald Trump’s first election for his administration were like a state of limbo: the bar keeps falling and the dance continues.

One of the first candidates was Marco Rubio for Secretary of State; The Floridian has some questionable views, but is at least a third-term senator and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, not the nihilistic troll Richard Grenell. Then there was Rep. Michael Waltz as national security adviser; He has no experience running something like the National Security Council, but he does have expertise in national security. Former Representative Lee Zeldin for the EPA? The bar kept dropping, but hey, he worked in government and isn’t currently an oil company executive.

However, yesterday afternoon the bar hit stunning new lows. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was one of the least qualified candidates in the first Trump regime; This time he could be one of the more experienced, although Trump’s statement that he was nominated for the post of CIA director, in which he cited his sycophancy rather than his resume, was not exactly reassuring. For the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest and most complicated parts of the federal government, Trump chose Kristi Noem, a small business owner and governor of a sparsely populated state — but a die-hard MAGA loyalist. The previous low point was reached when President-elect announced Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has criticized the military for being “woke” and has advocated for pardons of convicted war criminals. He once bragged that he hadn’t washed his hands in ten years, but still sells soap in the form of grenades. His key qualifications for leading one of the most complex bureaucracies in human history are his good looks, and Trump has often seen him on Fox News.

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Perhaps the bar cannot be lowered from here on out—at least not with respect to positions of immense consequence that actually have the power to do great harm in the world. But another appointment announced yesterday was in some ways even more ridiculous: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a government efficiency division. That’s DOGE for short. Get it? So efficient. Very weird. Wow. Welcome to the age of government by meme.

Memes are raunchy, neither serious nor really joking. Try to pin them down and they’ll slip through your fingers. DOGE, like Doge, is no different. Why is this thing called a “department” when only Congress has the power to create a new body with that name? Is it because Trump doesn’t know or because he doesn’t care? Why does a government efficiency panel have two chairs? Maybe it’s a joke. Who can say? Is DOGE a smart way to eliminate two annoying loudmouths who can’t or won’t get through the Senate confirmation process, or could it radically reshape the federal government? As the meme says, why not both? The whole thing is vaporware, invented by three people – Musk, Ramaswamy and Trump – who are all incurably online.

“Waste, fraud and abuse” is something of a meme – an idea that is repeated and used in many different formats, but provides more of a symbolic meaning and cultural connotation than a specific label. Like most memes, this one is neither serious nor joking. Who wants to waste, cheat or misuse tax money? The problem, as Eric Schnurer explained in The Atlanticis that there just isn’t as much of it as people think. The way to radically cut government spending is to cut entire categories of things. (As a contractor, it’s important to note that Musk is a big beneficiary of government largesse.)

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Trump hasn’t provided many details about how DOGE would work, although of course Musk has already produced a great meme. Ironically, we don’t know how DOGE works or how it is funded. Trump says it will “provide advice and guidance from outside the government” to the White House and the Office of Management and Budget and make recommendations no later than the country’s 500th anniversary on July 4, 2026.

In the absence of any real information, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is probably a pretty good model for understanding how this might work. When Musk bought the social media network, he made a lot of promises. He said he would eliminate bots, improve the user base, refine the business and reduce political interference so that Twitter could function as a “common digital town square.” By these metrics, the acquisition was a failure. The service is full of bots. Users and advertisers fled. Many technical functions are impaired. Instead of becoming a more politically neutral venue, it has become a playground for the far right, which Musk uses to spread conspiracy theories and support Trump. He gave the company a slick rebrand to X and cut the workforce.

We can expect something similar from DOGE. Will it successfully achieve the stated policy goal of restructuring the federal workforce to reduce waste and fraud and improve service delivery? Almost certainly not. Will it work to drive away committed employees? Probably. The safest bet is that it is an extremely effective means of furthering Musk and Trump’s political agenda. What a victory. Very chaotic. Much dark.