Lame duck or dead duck !!

Bureaucrats, as is their wont, spend hours speculating their future and that of the Government's during any political crisis. After a meeting of the Committee of Secretaries last week, a senior IAS officer came out with his own interpretation of the usage "lame-duck" while walking down the Cabinet Secretariat's corridors. He suggested that a lame-duck could as well turn out to be a dead-duck !! Is a lame-duck Government in the offing ?