The price of Dogecoin, the dog-themed meme coin, is making waves. The cryptocurrency has multiplied its value by four since October, hitting US$0.4. The massive surge in price comes as United States (US) president-elect Trump has announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the same initials as the ticker symbol for Dogecoin.

Dogecoin’s popularity has made it the seventh most popular cryptocurrency, with a market capitalisation exceeding US$57 billion. This is far from the US$1.83 trillion market cap of Bitcoin, which is also rallying after Trump’s victory, but still greater than, for instance, the market cap of Volkswagen (US$48 billion), a company that delivered 9.24 million vehicles in 2023.

Nonetheless, Dogecoin is still far from its all-time high price of US$0.74 per token in 2021. Tech billionaire Elon Musk helped fuel Dogecoin’s 2021 rally with many X posts of support for the cryptocurrency, saying, for example, that “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto”. In other posts, he said “Dogecoin to the Moooonn” and referred to himself as the “dogefather”. Musk’s Tesla also accepts Dogecoin as payment for some merchandise in its store.

Furthermore, Musk’s SpaceX accepted Dogecoin payment for launching the DOGE-1 satellite.

However, Musk’s support for the coin didn’t prevent the cryptocurrency from falling from US$0.74 in 2021 to US$0.05 in 2022, leading many to warn against investing in such volatile assets. In 2017, after Dogecoin’s first major price surge, Jackson Palmer, the creator of the meme coin, said in a New York Times interview, “It’s a very bubble. It’s a scam. So avoid it.”

DOGE: The Department of Government Efficiency

President-elect Donald Trump announced this month that Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the DOGE. According to Trump, this new department will “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Trump has touted DOGE as the “Manhattan Project of our time,” echoing the effort undertaken by many scientists to develop the nuclear bomb under Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership. The arduous effort, in this case, will be to rein in the countries’ deficit, one of the highest among the nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and put an end to the spiralling US debt that has grown to US$36 trillion.

The department will “provide advice and guidance from outside of the Government” and partner with the White House and the Office of Management & Budget to cut the US deficit, which has already topped US$1.83 trillion this year. The DOGE will cease to exist on July 4, 2026, as stated by Trump.

Musk has expressed through the social network X that the DOGE will try to oversee US government fraud, which is estimated between US$233 and US$521 billion per year, and bring government agencies into line, such as the US Department of Defense, which recently failed its seventh audit in a row (unlike Nasa, which just received a “clean” financial audit opinion). Moreover, DOGE will also advise on simplifying the lengthy US tax code and regulations.