How Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus reacted to Trump's 'DOGE' announcement

Pro-crypto President-elect Donald Trump will bring "DOGE" to the White House.

Amid a flurry of appointments and nominations, Trump said Tuesday night that the Department of Government Efficiency will "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies."

The department will be led by two billionaires, Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X) and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. The latter ran as a Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election but dropped out of the race in January.

DOGE will provide guidance to drive large-scale structural reform from outside the U.S. government and take an unprecedented “entrepreneurial approach” as it collaborates with the White House and Office of Management and Budget, according to Trump's statement.

Musk has been vocal about the need for deregulation  and the need for a "DOGE" — the moniker he gave to the idea of a cost-cutting team — over the past year. Musk is a well-known fan of the Dogecoin meme, and his posts about the coin helped push it to all-time highs around $0.73 in the summer of 2021.

“I’m actually not actively involved in crypto,” Musk said last month. “I make Dogecoin jokes and stuff because I just kind of like Dogecoin. Because it’s got the best sense of humor, and it has dogs and memes, and I love all those things.”

Dogecoin, widely considered the first memecoin, was created as a joke in 2013 by software engineers Markus and Jackson Palmer. The Dogecoin Foundation was established in 2014 to provide advocacy and support for the project. The foundation was "re-invigorated" in 2021 by members of the original core team, along with new faces and advisors.

"DOGE is now officially part of the us government," the token's co-creator Billy Markus said Tuesday night on X. "i’m not sure this is real life."

As of Nov. 13, DOGE is the sixth-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $59.4 billion.

“Dogecoin’s position as the leading memecoin, along with its broad recognition among retail investors, makes it especially compelling in today’s meme-driven market,” Min Jung, an analyst at Presto Research, told The Block earlier this week.

Markus, Musk and Vivek react

Ramaswamy said DOGE will crowdsource examples of government waste, fraud and abuse.

"Over the last 2 years, the Supreme Court has ruled that the administrative state is behaving in wildly unlawful ways. But slapping the bureaucracy on the wrist won’t solve the problem, the only right answer is a massive downsizing," he said on X.

Markus has developed a large, cult-like following on X, formerly known as Twitter. While his posts are often comedic in nature, he does strike a more serious tone when it comes to real-world issues.

"so i will say that cutting government spending will be a painful thing," Markus said Tuesday night. "our economy is addicted to government money - the recent gdp growth has mostly been from unsustainable government spending."

Markus said it's "absolutely necessary to reduce the insane amount of spending we are doing," noting the U.S. has added $15 trillion in debt over the past eight years.

"this is awful but because it’s so entangled and the government bloated up so much recently, it’s not going to be flowers and rainbows at least imo we have the right person to do it," he said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Markus mentioned how a user can remove Dogecoin inflation in the GitHub code. "I think the flat inflation of Dogecoin, which means decreasing percentage inflation, is a feature, not a bug," Musk responded.

For his part, Palmer has been mostly absent from social media for several years. He popped up with a Twitter thread in 2023 to explain his views, although the posts and his account have since been deleted.

"I am often asked if I will 'return to cryptocurrency' or begin regularly sharing my thoughts on the topic again. My answer is a wholehearted 'no'," Palmer said at the time. "cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of today's capitalist system (eg. corruption, fraud, inequality) and using software to technically limit the use of interventions (eg. audits, regulation, taxation) which serve as protections or safety nets for the average person."

Musk, a serial poster on the platform he bought for $44 billion, has reposted several messages cheering on the new department.

"The world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation. Every year, the noose tightens a little more. We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good," Musk said . Of note, the previously suspended @DOGE X account has been restored to become the official account for the Department of Government Efficiency.

DOGE trades around $0.40, up 1.1% over the past 24 hours, according to The Block's price page . Heading into Election Day on Nov. 5, the coin traded around $0.15.

The GMCI 30 was up 0.7% to 162.42, while the GMCI MEME was up 7.8% to 506.54 at publication time.