WHEN DOGE TSARS GO TILTING AT WINDMILLS

OGECOIN 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 two putative co-heads, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to slash the US federal government's size and spend.

- KAJAL BASU

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 is a Japanese Shiba Inu dog. DOGE's mascot—as publicized 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 federal employees, only 15 percent of whom are based in Washington DC, with 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 the two 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.