Top White House officials are cracking down on everyday spending across the government, sowing confusion, reshaping how staffers go about their daily duties, and upending everything from scientific research and cleaning up trash to keeping the lights on.
Travel has been halted and government credit cards frozen or severely limited across the federal footprint. On Tuesday, Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s top adviser who leads the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, announced on X that hundreds of thousands of credit and purchasing cards have been limited or axed at agencies like EPA and the Interior Department, which houses almost a dozen bureaus, offices and agencies.
The tech billionaire also made clear that the audits have just begun.
“Even after canceling 200k, there are still twice as many government credit cards as there are government employees!” Musk wrote.
While ethics experts have long raised concerns about possible abuses of government credit cards and Musk is touting the cuts as saving taxpayers money, more than half a dozen career staffers interviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News — and granted anonymity to speak freely and without fear of reprisal — described a confusing and haphazard freeze that’s tying up purchases and payments in real time.
Employees across the Interior Department said they’re struggling to pay bills and fund services.
One volunteer at a national wildlife refuge in Wisconsin said the spending restriction was “like a boa constrictor sucking the life” out of them. “With no credit card access right now, just keeping [the] lights on is difficult,” they said.
The freeze is directly linked to Trump’s far-reaching Feb. 26 executive order that calls on agency heads — with help from DOGE — to review expenditures and leases, and imposes a 30-day spending pause while allowing exceptions for “critical services.” It also calls for the creation of a centralized system to approve purchases. The administration said the order is aimed at ensuring “employees are accountable to the American public.”
But the White House declined to comment when asked how and if the executive order is being implemented uniformly across the government.
While some agencies like the General Services Administration imposed cuts before the executive order was inked, others have followed suit through verbal and written orders for career staffers in recent weeks.
National Park Service superintendents knew the freeze was coming, according to a Feb. 24 email viewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. Leaders told staff to prepare, such as by filling gas tanks and addressing immediate needs for credit card spending before most credit card purchases would be restricted to approval from a single regional cardholder.
One park ranger in the Northeast region said they feared the purchasing restrictions were preparation for wide-scale layoffs.
At DOD, top Pentagon officials issued a March 5 memo that limited spending on travel and imposed a $1 cap on government travel charge cards, saying it was taking “immediate action” to comply with the executive order and “reduce and consolidate government-issued travel charge card spending.”
And at EPA, employees were instructed to clear big-ticket spending — transactions that surpass $50,000 — with that agency’s DOGE team, according to a guidance document obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. Employees must also confirm that spending aligns with Trump’s executive orders and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s agenda for the agency.
But at the Energy Department, multiple career staffers said they hadn’t received any formal guidance, that travel has been curtailed and federal credit cards limited in some offices. Others said they were being asked to craft a list of expenses for approval by DOE management.
“It’s extremely tough to get anything done,” said one staffer.
‘Took out the hatchet’
Ethics experts have long raised concerns about government credit cards, but they said the blanket approach the Trump administration is taking could have even more damaging consequences.
The Project on Government Oversight, for example, highlighted a report in 2015 from the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General, which found DOD cardholders had used their travel cards for personal use at casinos and strip clubs.
The transactions were not detected, according to the report, because the agency’s compliance program hadn’t identified personal use of the cards at such establishments.
But Scott Amey, POGO’s general counsel, said that although government purchase and travel cards have been “a problematic issue for years and one that needs a genuine solution,” making change takes time and should be done carefully.
“It seems, however, the administration took out the hatchet rather than the scalpel, and its approach will cause inefficiencies,” Amey said. “Finding fraudulent, improper and abusive purchases takes time and improved systems, not a knee-jerk reaction to shut them down.”
The freeze on travel credit cards, for example, applies to personnel at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency charged with managing water resources, dams and levees across the nation.
Staff now must obtain approval for travel to inspect dams and levees, conduct water quality sampling, and attend training sessions, according to two employees at the agency.
One Army Corps staffer who oversees dams and reservoirs in a regional office said employees are effectively “stuck” in place. Depending on how long the policy lasts, critical inspections of decades-old dams could be delayed, they said. Compounding the problem is the hiring freeze imposed on the agency, which has resulted in some staff positions being left unfilled, they added.
“There’s a lot more hoops we have to go through to physically go out to a dam right now,” the staffer said. “My biggest concern would be we’re not going to have people to support that mission of ours to make sure our infrastructure is safe.”
Colin Smalley, who represents a union for Army Corps employees, said the policy comes at a time when the agency is busier than ever. The agency has been “on the front lines of climate change,” responding to wildfires and hurricanes across the U.S., on top of the growing backlog of environmental studies and projects that Congress has directed the agency to work on, he said.
“When we talk about the mission of the Army Corps, there are lots of operational site visits that are planned at any given time,” said Smalley, president of Local 777 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. “At least up until now, the union hasn’t been notified of any further guidance from DOD or USACE as far as things they plan to exempt.”
Army Corps spokesperson Gene Pawlik confirmed that credit card expenses were capped at $1.
“Among the authorized exemptions are travel for responses to natural disasters, direct support to Civil Works projects to the extent necessary to protect against imminent threats to human life and property, and direct support of military operations,” Pawlik said in a statement.
‘They use the credit cards for everything’
The spending freeze is hitting hard across a large swath of agencies that fall under the Interior Department, affecting everything from trash collection to upkeep at wildlife refuges.
A representative of one domestic U.S. science conference said they knew of several U.S. Geological Survey scientists who had canceled plans to attend, apparently as a consequence of the spending limit imposed on the agency.
The freeze on travel initially created panic at the USGS because it imperiled monitoring of a “restive” volcano in Alaska, as well as water monitoring sites across the country, before the survey and Interior worked out a near-term solution, according to an employee familiar with the survey’s monitoring networks.
The USGS maintains more than 12,000 streamgage sites and 3,000 groundwater monitoring sites. Some of these are cooperatively funded, but that agreement is based on a commitments from the USGS to service the equipment, the employee said.
“While these exemptions have allowed the USGS to address the most pressing maintenance problems, if the $1 limitations continue indefinitely, there will be negative impacts to USGS monitoring networks,” the employee said.
Desirée Sorenson-Groves, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, put the clamp-down in context by noting that in just one Fish and Wildlife Service region, there are more than 22,000 individual purchase card transactions involving the region’s refuges annually.
A 2016 audit by Interior’s Office of Inspector General found that at that time there were 26,518 purchase card accounts across the Interior Department, used to make almost 1.2 million transactions that totaled approximately $394 million.
“I mean, they use the credit cards for everything,” Sorenson-Groves said. “They use it for travel, for the trash service to come, for the electrical bill, for vehicles. They use it for everything.”
Jacob Malcom, former head of Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis, cited the example of on-the-ground staffers who are responsible for public meetings and other forms of public engagement.
“They involve actions like paying for venues, and they can’t do it with $1 limits,” Malcom said, adding that he “can’t get more specific without naming particular offices that might get blamed for leaks.”
Sorenson-Groves noted the fallout will include local businesses that won’t be getting paid in a timely way. The refuge will get “months behind in arrears” while the local contractors suffer, she said.
While there are exemptions for public safety “or other critical services,” the card freeze has caused major problems with day-to-day operations for Interior’s National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, the government watchdog Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility reported last week.
Most planned travel for staffers has been canceled as of last week, according to an agency official with knowledge of the situation. Some canceled travel reservations incurred late fees.
The Northeast park ranger said controlled burns across the region had been canceled because employees weren’t allowed to travel. Controlled burns reduce the risk and severity of wildfires by burning away fast fuels like dead weeds and improve native plant growth.
A separate park ranger working in the West said their park’s payment to Starlink — the satellite internet service controlled by Musk and his company SpaceX — bounced.
“Nothing is getting approved unless it’s mission critical,” the ranger said. “Purchasing has just come to a complete halt. Utility bills and cellphones aren’t getting paid. Basic operating functions.”
The Interior Department defended the spending freeze in a statement, in lieu of answering questions about how it was affecting operations.
“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, we are eliminating wasteful programs, cutting unnecessary costs, and ensuring every dollar serves a clear purpose,” Interior spokesperson Elizabeth Peace said in an email. “By streamlining operations and focusing resources on conservation, responsible energy development, and public land protection, we are prioritizing taxpayers while upholding our mission.”
The purchase card freeze is in contrast to what happened in the first Trump administration, when then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke used authority newly provided by Congress to raise the threshold for card usage from $3,500 to $10,000.
“Increasing the purchase card spending limit provides opportunities for field personnel to quickly and easily buy the goods and services that they need, while allowing contracting officers to focus on more complex contracts,” Zinke said at the time.
Requiring all EPA transactions over $50,000 to be authorized by DOGE first “undermines EPA’s ability to respond to emergencies,” said Carlton Waterhouse, who led EPA’s solid waste office during the Biden administration.
Cliff Villa, former deputy assistant administrator in EPA’s waste office, warned that reining in the authority on-scene coordinators have to make quick decisions on spending could “endanger” the agency’s response in real-time emergencies.
“They need to make decisions very quickly; they can’t possibly be second-guessed by people at DOGE who don’t have any idea what EPA does,” Villa said. “In fact, not even their managers have the capacity to second-guess their work. It’s crazy that someone outside the agency would be authorized to second-guess their decisions.”
The agency did not respond to requests for comment on the new spending policies or whether any exemptions had been carved out for things like disaster response.
Reporters Ellie Borst and Scott Streater contributed.
