The announcements of Donald Trump’s first choices for his administration were like a vacuum: the bar continues to lower and the dance continues.

One of the early candidates was Marco Rubio for secretary of state; the Floridian has questionable views but is at least a third-term senator and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and is not the nihilist troll Richard Grenell. Then there was Rep. Michael Waltz as national security adviser; he has no experience running the National Security Council, but he does have expertise in national security. Former EPA Rep. Lee Zeldin? The bar kept getting lower, but hey, he worked in government and is not currently an executive at an oil company.

Yesterday afternoon, however, the bar reached incredible new lows. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was one of the the least qualified appointees in the first Trump regime; he may be one of the most experienced this time around, even if statement Nominating him for the position of CIA director, citing not his resume but his sycophancy, was not reassuring. For the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest and most complex parts of the federal government, Trump chose Kristi Noem, a businesswoman and governor of a sparsely populated state but a die-hard MAGA loyalist . The lowest point, so far, was reached when the president-elect announced Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has castigated the military for being “woke” and pushed for pardons of war criminals. He once boast that he hadn’t washed his hands in 10 years, but he still peddles pomegranate shaped soap. His main qualifications for running one of the most complicated bureaucracies in human history are that he looks up to the task and Trump has seen a lot of that on Fox News.

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Maybe the bar can’t get any lower from there – at least not in terms of positions of immense consequence and real power to do a lot of damage in the world. But another appointment announced yesterday was in a sense even more ridiculous: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Ministry of Government Effectiveness. It’s DOGE for short. Get it? So effective. Very slash. Wow. Welcome to the age of government by meme.

The memes are slippery, neither serious nor truly joking. Try to pin them and they 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 agency with that name? Is it because Trump doesn’t know or because he doesn’t care? Why does a government effectiveness panel have two chairs? Maybe it’s a joke. Who can say it? Is DOGE a smart way to sideline two annoying loud mouths who can’t or won’t get through the Senate confirmation process, or could this radically reshape the federal government? As the meme says, why not both? The whole thing is just vaporware, concocted by three people – Musk, Ramaswamy and Trump – all of whom are terminally ill with Internet connections.

“Waste, fraud and abuse” is itself a sort of meme: an idea that is repeated and used in many different formats, but which offers more of a symbolic meaning and cultural connotation than a specific denotation. Like most memes, this one is neither serious nor joking. Who could want waste, fraud or abuse of taxpayers’ money? The problem, as Eric Schnurer said explain In The Atlanticit’s that there just aren’t as many as you think. The way to radically reduce government spending is to cut entire categories of things. (As an entrepreneur, it should be noted, Musk is a huge beneficiary of government largesse.)

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Trump hasn’t provided many details about how DOGE works, although Musk, naturally, already has produced an awesome meme. Ironically, we don’t know how DOGE will work or how it will be funded. Trump says he will “provide advice and guidance from outside the government” to the White House and the Office of Management and Budget, making recommendations no later than the nation’s semi-fiftieth anniversary on June 4. July 2026.

In the absence of real information, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is probably a very good model for how this could work. When Musk bought the social network, he made many promises. He said he would eliminate bots, improve the user base, refine activity and reduce political interference, so Twitter could function as “a common digital town square.” Judging by these parameters, the buyout was a failure. The service is full of robots. Users and advertisers fled. Many technical functions have deteriorated. Rather than becoming a more politically neutral place, it has become a playground for the hard right, with Musk using it to spread conspiracy theories and help Trump. He gave it a clever rebrand as X and downsized.

We can expect much the same from DOGE. Will it achieve the stated policy goal of reconfiguring the federal workforce to reduce waste and fraud and improve service delivery? Certainly not. Will this succeed in driving away dedicated employees? Probably. It’s a safe bet that this will be a very effective vehicle for advancing Musk and Trump’s political agenda. Such a victory. Very chaotic. Very dark.