Trump issues executive order freezing federal workers' credit cards
US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at freezing the government-issued credit cards of federal employees for 30 days.
The executive order aims to give the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) more power over a new "cost efficiency initiative," News.Az reports, citing US media.
This freeze, as stated in the order, can only be implemented "to the maximum extent permitted by law" and it covers all cards "except for any credit cards held by employees engaged in, or charges related to employees utilizing such credit cards for, disaster relief or natural disaster response benefits or operations or other critical services as determined by the Agency Head, and subject to such additional individualized or categorical exceptions as the Agency Head, in consultation with the agency's DOGE Team Lead, deems appropriate."
DOGE has claimed that 4.6 million government credit cards have been responsible for $40 billion in spending last year. The agency has not elaborated on what purchases were made with these cards.
A Congressional review from 2014 found that some government credit cards were being used for personal purchases, however, the most money spent across prohibited purchases within an agency was $76,500. A lot of money, but significantly less than $40 billion.
DOGE has got its math wrong before. For example, this week it said it had saved $8 billion from slashing a contract with ICE. That contract was actually $8 million.
The purpose of this executive order is to increase transparency around government spending.
The Government Card Charge Abuse Prevention Act of 2012 already requires the Inspector General to audit all agencies with more than $10 million in travel card spending. These audits are then delivered to the head of the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The Act also states "records are kept of each holder of a purchase card and the applicable transaction limits."
The executive order states that DOGE is working to "build a centralized technological system within the agency to seamlessly record every payment issued by the agency pursuant to each of the agency's covered contracts and grants, along with a brief, written justification for each payment submitted by the agency employee who approved the payment."
This means DOGE will oversee all government payments, instead of those payments being up to the agencies who need to use their credit cards. It is unclear how making one agency review billions of dollars of payments across multiple different organizations will increase efficiency.
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