It’s official: Elon Musk has been given a cabinet position. He is teaming up with failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with downsizing the government. It is only fitting, therefore, that this position would have two co-chairs.

Trump described this effort as essential to his administration’s goal of “saving America” and likened it to a significant historical initiative, calling it “the Manhattan Project of our time” in terms of its potential impact. How cutting a government is in anyway comparable to the creation of nuclear weapons is anyone’s guess.

A new government ministry is always of note, with the naming of this one particularly so. The abbreviation of the new department being ‘DOGE’ is not an accident; it is undoubtedly a link to Elon Musk’s claim to be the “Meme Lord”, skin-crawlingly cringe for a 53-year old person to say.

Doge is a more-than-a-decade-old meme surrounding a Japanese dog, which was appropriated into a cryptocurrency.

What is Doge the dog?

Doge the dog is actually a Shiba Inu named Kabosu. Born in Japan, Kabosu became famous after a photograph taken in 2010 was transformed into the “Doge” meme, which gained immense popularity in 2013.

The meme features Kabosu’s expressive face alongside captions written in Comic Sans font, using broken English to convey its thoughts, such as “Much wow” and “So amaze”.

The internet meme was central for the creation of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency launched in December 2013 that leveraged the Doge meme for branding. Elon Musk has been a strong proponent of Dogecoin with the cryptocurrency trebling in value since the election.