The DOGE Saga

The Plan Is Hatched. (It Was Always Going To Be This.)

It started, as all truly unhinged ideas do, with brainE pacing around a very large room muttering to himself.

"Dinky," he said one day, fixing his friend with the kind of look that has preceded every historic mistake in human history, "what if we just… ran the government? Like, really ran it. Fixed it. Went in there with a spreadsheet and a very strong opinion and didn't leave until it made sense."

Dinky thought about this for approximately four seconds — which, for Dinky, is a very long time — and said: "I love it. We're doing it. It's going to be tremendous. What are we calling it?"

brainE smiled. "The Department of Government Efficiency."

"Incredible. And the acronym?"

"D-O-G-E."

Somewhere, a golden retriever sneezed. Nobody noticed. The plan was already in motion.

Day One. brainE Goes To Washington.

Inauguration Day. Dinky is barely done waving at the crowd before brainE is already inside federal buildings, laptop open, asking where the WiFi password is.

He brought a team. Young engineers. Fast talkers. People who had never worked in government before, which brainE considered a feature rather than a bug. "Fresh eyes," he called them. The federal employees called them something else, but we're keeping this family-friendly.

Within the first week, brainE had sat in on briefings at twelve different agencies, declared at least six of them "obviously wasteful," and posted about all of it on X before the relevant departments had even been informed. The federal government learned what was happening to it the same way everyone else did — by refreshing their feeds at 2am.

Washington had not seen chaos like this since… well, since the last time Dinky showed up. But this was different. This had a spreadsheet.

The Email That Broke The Government

brainE's first move was an email. Just an email. To all 2.3 million federal employees at once.

Subject line: "Fork in the Road."

The email basically said: Resign now and we'll pay you through September. Or stay — but fair warning, we're about to have VERY high standards. Your call. No pressure. Actually a little pressure. Okay, a lot of pressure. Good luck either way.

75,000 people took the offer and left. Which sounds like a lot until you realise that's out of 2.3 million, and most of the ones who left were probably the ones who actually knew what they were doing. Classic.

But brainE wasn't done. A second email went out to everyone who stayed: reply with five bullet points about what you accomplished this week, or we'll assume you did nothing.

Two point three million people suddenly had to write bullet points. The federal government — an institution that moves at the speed of a committee meeting about scheduling a committee meeting — was now doing weekly check-ins like a tech startup that just raised its Series A.

The courts later said some of this was illegal. brainE had already sent the third email by then.

The Credit Cards. Oh No. The Credit Cards.

Here's the thing about running a government: a lot of it is just buying stuff. Paper. Coffee. Toilet paper. Software. The unglamorous plumbing of civilisation.

brainE looked at all those government purchase cards — hundreds of thousands of them — and thought: wasteful. So DOGE cancelled them. All of them. Overnight. Without telling anyone first.

Federal workers showed up to work and discovered their cards didn't work. Agencies tried to pay for already-delivered supplies and got declined. One department reportedly couldn't restock toilet paper. The United States government — a nation that put humans on the moon, built the internet, and invented the nuclear bomb — could not buy toilet paper.

Was it wasteful spending being cut? Was it chaos? Was it both? The answer, delightfully, was yes.

Then DOGE got access to the Treasury's payment systems. The ones that process $6 trillion a year. Social Security. Medicare. Military pay. The engineers were, reportedly, quite young. The Treasury staff were, reportedly, quite stressed. The judges who found out about it were, reportedly, not pleased at all.

brainE Starts Shutting Things Down (With Great Enthusiasm)

Once brainE found his rhythm, he couldn't stop. Agencies started falling like dominoes at a party nobody was invited to.

USAID — an agency that had been feeding people and preventing diseases around the world for decades — got called a "criminal organisation" on a Tuesday and was effectively shut down by Friday. Thousands of aid workers came in Monday morning to find the building locked. The website went dark. Overseas programmes stopped mid-sentence. Global health workers described it as watching a tap get turned off in the middle of surgery. brainE described it as "cutting waste."

Voice of America — an 80-year-old broadcaster that had kept broadcasting through the Cold War, through 9/11, through every crisis you've ever heard of — got shut down on a weekend. One weekend. 1,300 journalists. Gone. The station that had outlasted the Soviet Union did not outlast DOGE.

The CFPB — the bureau that existed to stop banks from scamming ordinary people — got a tweet: "CFPB RIP 🪦" from brainE's personal account. The building was closed. Staff were told to stop working. Courts blocked the shutdown within days, but the vibes were irreparably altered.

The courts, by the way, were very busy during this period. Filing injunctions. Blocking actions. Reinstating fired workers. They were doing more overtime than anyone.

Meanwhile, Tesla Is Having A Very Bad Time

While brainE was busy remodelling the executive branch, nobody was watching the car company.

Tesla's stock had dropped 40%. Europeans were boycotting. Cybertrucks were piling up in lots. Showrooms in Germany had protesters outside. Tesla's own shareholders were sending very polite but extremely concerned letters asking brainE to perhaps, maybe, when he got a moment, come back to work.

brainE was busy cancelling another agency.

The irony of a man dedicated to saving the government money while losing his shareholders an astonishing amount of it did not escape anyone. Except possibly brainE, who was on X posting about waste at 3am.

The Breakup Nobody Saw Coming (Everyone Saw Coming)

It was always going to end this way.

Dinky pushed his big spending bill through Congress — the "One Big Beautiful Bill," he called it, in the way that Dinky names everything he likes. brainE looked at the numbers, looked at the bill, looked at the numbers again, and absolutely lost it.

He went on X. He called it a betrayal. He threatened to back primary challengers against any Republican who voted for it. He named names. He posted at 11pm. Then midnight. Then 1am. The posts kept coming like a man who has just discovered a group chat he was left out of.

Dinky, for his part, went on Truth Social and posted things about brainE that were not very flattering. The two men who had stood together grinning at every press photo for months suddenly had a lot of scheduling conflicts whenever the other one was in the building.

The bill passed. The friendship did not survive at full strength. The internet had the time of its life.

He Just… Left. Back To The Cars.

By May 2026, brainE Musk quietly stepped back from DOGE. He didn't call it quitting. Nobody called it quitting. It was called "returning focus to his companies," which is the Washington way of saying: this got complicated and my stock price needs me.

He left behind a government that looked genuinely different. Fewer people. Fewer agencies running at full speed. A legal system that had been on a red-bull-fuelled overtime sprint for six months. And a DOGE savings tracker website that had listed $160 billion in claimed savings — which independent budget analysts politely noted was… a creative interpretation of the numbers.

The DOGE website quietly went offline shortly after.

Tesla stock went back up the moment brainE came home. Which tells you everything you need to know about everything.

The credit cards were, slowly, reactivated. The toilet paper situation was resolved. Voice of America remained silent. The courts kept issuing opinions. And somewhere in a federal building, a junior employee was still typing their five bullet points, just in case.

So What Did We Actually Learn?

Good question. Here's the short version:

• If you give one man access to the entire federal government and a Twitter account, extraordinary things will happen. Not all of them good. But extraordinary.
• Cancelling 2.3 million people's credit cards at once is technically efficient, in the same way that turning off a hospital's power is technically turning something off.
• Courts are slow. DOGE was fast. Courts were still writing opinions about things DOGE had already moved past. It was like arguing with a man who has already left the building.
• Tesla and government efficiency are, it turns out, inversely correlated. This is now empirically proven.
• brainE and Dinky will be back. The plan never really ends. It just pauses to refuel.
• And out of all this beautiful chaos — the emails and the shutdowns and the court orders and the tweets — a little meme coin called $NARF was born. Because if those two can run the government on vibes and a spreadsheet, we can definitely run a token. Eight billion of them. Narf.