Remember Doge, aka the Department of Government Efficiency? You know, the pseudo federal agency dreamt up by Elon Musk and named after a memecoin that was going to cut trillions of dollars from America’s budget and drastically shrink the administrative state?
Alas, it seems Doge has had its day. The grand bureaucracy-bashing, waste-walloping programme was due to keep running as a “temporary organisation” until July 2026, as set out in Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year, but it appears to have been quietly disbanded ahead of schedule. Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor told Reuters that Doge was no longer a “centralised entity” and that his office had taken over many of Doge’s functions.
Was Musk just doing it for the lulz? It wasn’t entirely clear. It was all just too good — almost too good to be true, and the funniest thing of all was that it was true. We had seemed to have entered a brave and magical new world in which the boundaries between reality and unreality had become totally blurred; in which the truth could be whatever you said it was.
[W]hat we are seeing in these wobbles is a gradual move away from the era of lol that has defined the years since Trump became president for the first time.
The current favourite to be the next US president, JD Vance, could not provide any lols if he tried. It turned out you couldn’t win an election on the basis of a “Brat summer”. It suddenly feels like the lols aren’t landing. That joke isn’t funny any more.
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