Donald Trump Freezes Credit Cards of Federal Workers: What To Know

Donald Trump has issued an executive order attempting to freeze the government-issued credit cards of federal workers for 30 days.

The executive order aims to give the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) more power over a new “cost efficiency initiative.”

However, an anonymous source within the Federal Government told Newsweek that this is “basically a government shutdown but worse because of the uncertainty.”

This freeze, as stated in the order, can be implemented only “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.”

Why It Matters

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.

What To Know

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.

It also states that this oversight will be implemented by the DOGE team lead within each agency. The names of these team leaders are unclear, and DOGE employees this week struggled to name who the head of the entire agency is. According to the White House, Elon Musk is not running DOGE, Amy Gleason is. There is no information on when she was appointed to this position.

What People Are Saying

A Federal Government employee told Newsweek: “It honestly might be described as basically-a-government-shutdown but worse because of the uncertainty. Are [federal] employees still supposed to travel? Are they just supposed to use their personal cards and hope they get paid back?”

DOGE said on X: “DOGE is working w/ the agencies to simplify the [credit card] program and reduce admin costs—we will report back in 1 week.”

Frank Han, a UIC adult congenital and pediatric cardiologist, wrote on X :”So the new DOGE apparently declared by decree that all government issued credit cards shall have a spending limit of 1 dollar, that are assigned to the General Services Administration. That could look like government efficiency until you apply it to Veterans Hospitals—which means a literal hospital is not allowed to resupply itself or transport vets in need of health care, because some college students thought they were wasteful.”

What Happens Next

The executive order states that cards can be frozen only within the extent of the law, and makes several exceptions for cards that are needed for “critical services.” It is likely, like many other Trump orders, that this one will end up in court.

Update 2/27/25 8:39 a.m. ET: This story was updated to include comment from a federal employee.