Donald Trump, in the midst of appointing his government team, confirmed his campaign promise on Tuesday, November 12, by announcing that he would appoint the richest man on the planet, boss of Tesla and created “government efficiency”, jointly with Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. And he warns: these two allies will “send shock waves through the system”.
What will be the purpose of this ministry?
“Together, these two great Americans will chart a path for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excessive regulations, cut wasteful spending, and restructure federal agencies,” Donald Trump said in a statement. He even compared it to the “Manhattan Project of our time,” named after the American research and development program during World War II to create the atomic bomb.
If the three wealthy businessmen come to an enduring agreement, they could make 2,000 billion dollars in clear cuts in a federal government budget of 6,500 to 7,000 billion. “I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes in the federal bureaucracy, with a vision for efficiency and, at the same time, to improve the lives of all Americans,” praised Donald Trump.
“It is important that we clean up the waste and mass fraud in government spending of $6.5 trillion. They will work together to free our economy and hold the United States government accountable to WE THE PEOPLE,” he added. proclaimed Donald Trump, without specifying what he was referring to when he spoke of “mass fraud”.
Elon Musk then announced on X that the ministry’s actions would be listed online “for maximum transparency”. A “ranking of the most terribly stupid expenses” will also be published, which “will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining”, he said.
Why did Donald Trump promise a ministry to Elon Musk?
Elon Musk played an unprecedented role in Donald Trump’s campaign, in which he invested more than $100 million, using his own social network, on which he posts continuously, as a sounding board, and even gave of himself during a meeting in Pennsylvania. His support committee organized a lottery offering a million dollars daily to registered voters in key states who agreed to sign a conservative petition in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.
It has been weeks since Donald Trump announced that the boss of Tesla, SpaceX and X would be tasked with a mission on the efficiency of the federal government. He gave Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy until July 4, 2026 for the world’s leading power to adopt a “smaller government” which would be “a perfect gift to America for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence” of July 4, 1776.
“Doge” in reference to a meme and dogecoin
In English, Elon Musk’s new ministry is titled “Department of Government Efficiency”, or the acronym “Doge”. However, “Doge” refers to a Japanese dog of the Shiba Inu breed, named Kabosu, known worldwide on the internet since 2010, thanks to a photo which inspired a wave of offbeat jokes and “memes”. The dog has become the emblem of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency originally created as a joke but with which Elon Musk became infatuated in 2021.
After years of “Dogemania”, the richest man in the world announced a space project supposed to be entirely financed in dogecoin: DOGE-1, a small satellite to be launched by his company SpaceX. Then he declared that this Dogecoin cryptocurrency could be used to buy certain Tesla products, and in 2023 he briefly used a Doge icon as the logo of Twitter, the social network that he bought in 2022 and renamed X.
Born on June 28, 1971 in South Africa to an engineer father and a Canadian model, Elon Musk – naturalized American – has become the most controversial figure of neo-capitalism. He shares his extra-planetary ambitions and his techno-libertarian ideas with more than 200 million subscribers on X. Forbes estimates his fortune at more than 300 billion dollars. A millionaire before the age of 30 after reselling an online software publisher that he had set up with his brother, Elon Musk subsequently founded X.com (an online bank), which would be merged with PayPal, then bought by eBay in 2002. Here he is, a minister, in addition to being at the head of Tesla, the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, and SpaceX, his space company.