The announcements of Donald Trump’s early choices for his administration were like limbo: the bar keeps falling and the dance keeps going.

One of the first nominees 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, and is not the nihilist troll Richard Grenell. Then there was Representative Michael Waltz as National Security Advisor; he has no experience leading something like the National Security Council, but he does have expertise in national security. Former Rep. Lee Zeldin for EPA? The bar continued to sink, but yes, he has worked in government and is not currently an oil company director.

Yesterday afternoon, however, the bar reached astonishing new lows. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was one of the least qualified appointees in the first Trump administration; he might be one of the more experienced this time around, although Trump’s statement nominating him as director of the CIA, which cited not his resume but his sycophancy, was not reassuring. For the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest and most complicated parts of the federal government, Trump selected Kristi Noem, a small businesswoman and governor of a sparsely populated state — but a die-hard MAGA loyalist. The low point yet was reached when newly elected President Pete Hegseth was announced as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is a National Guard veteran who has criticized the military for being “woke” and lobbying for pardons for convicted war criminals. He once bragged that he hadn’t washed his hands in ten years, but he still uses grenade-shaped soap. His main qualifications to run one of the most complex bureaucracies in human history are that he is good looking and that Trump has seen him on Fox News a lot.

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Perhaps the bar can’t be lowered from then on – at least not in terms of positions of enormous consequence and real power to wreak havoc in the world. But another appointment announced yesterday was in some ways even more ridiculous: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a Department of Government Efficiency. That’s DOGE for short. Do you get it? So efficient. Very slanted. Wow. Welcome to the age of government by meme.

Memes are glib, not serious, and not really joking. Try to pin them and they will 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 seats? Maybe it’s a joke. Who can tell? Is DOGE a smart way to sideline two annoying loudmouths who can’t or won’t get through the Senate confirmation process, or can it radically reform the federal government? As the meme says: why not both? The whole thing is vaporware, created by three people – Musk, Ramaswamy and Trump – who are all terminally online.

“Waste, fraud and abuse” is itself a kind of meme – an idea that is repeated and used in many different formats, but offers a symbolic meaning and cultural connotation rather than a specific denotation. Like most memes, this one is neither serious nor a joke. Who would ever want waste, fraud or misuse of taxpayer money? The problem, as Eric Schnurer explained in The Atlantic Oceanis that there simply isn’t as much of it as people think. The way to radically cut back on government spending is to cut across entire categories. (As a contractor, it should be noted that Musk is a major beneficiary of government largesse.)

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Trump hasn’t provided many details about how DOGE would work, though Musk has obviously already produced a dank meme. Ironically, we don’t know how DOGE will work or how it will be financed. 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 nation’s centennial, 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 could 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 company and reduce political interference so Twitter could function as “a communal digital town square.” Judging by these figures, the takeover was a failure. The service is overrun with bots. Users and advertisers have fled. Many technical functions have deteriorated. Instead of becoming a more politically neutral venue, it has become a playground for the far right, with Musk using it to spread conspiracy theories and help Trump. He gave it a slick rebrand as X and downsized the workforce.

We can expect much the same from DOGE. Will it successfully achieve its stated policy goal of reconfiguring the federal workforce to reduce waste and fraud and improve service delivery? Almost certainly not. Will it succeed in driving out dedicated employees? Probably. The surest bet is that it will be a very effective vehicle to advance Musk and Trump’s political agenda. What a victory. Very chaos. Much gloomy.