The directive falls under the administration’s Cost Efficiency Initiative, led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) program, which tweeted that nearly $40 billion was charged to government-issued credit cards last year.
By late March, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) program led by Elon Musk had fully cancelled 315,000 federal credit cards.
Cutting costs and programs
With a federal budget promising $4.5 trillion in income tax cuts, the credit-card freeze is one aspect of the Trump administration’s effort to find $2 trillion in savings to pay for those cuts.
Over the years, government watchdogs have uncovered credit-card misuse, revealing charges ranging from Lego sets to multi-course meals. Last year, as the Federal Times reported, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley grilled the Pentagon on its use of credit cards earmarked for COVID-19 expenditures to purchase Nordic skiing machines, among other items.
But beyond credit cards, Trump has made it clear his top priority in shrinking the workforce. On Jan. 20, he signed an executive order to freeze civilian hiring across departments and agencies, including the IRS. Thousands of probationary employees without civil service protections have been cut.
“We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job,” Trump said Wednesday, when he announced plans to slash up to 65% of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has already been effectively shuttered.
Programs impact millions of Americans
Meanwhile, workers at the Department of Labor and the Social Security Administration are bracing for similar cuts, raising serious concerns about how these reductions will affect critical services relied on by millions of Americans.
Even the credit-card freeze has left some federal workers concerned about how their departments are supposed to function and serve Americans on a daily basis.
“Are [federal] employees still supposed to travel? Are they just supposed to use their personal cards and hope they get paid back?" one government employee asked Newsweek.
Victoria Vesovski is a Toronto-based staff reporter at Moneywise covering personal finance, lifestyle and trending news. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto and New York University, and her work has appeared on platforms including Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and Apple News.
