- Some federal workers say they can’t do their jobs after a freeze on most federal credit cards. The cards handle $30 billion a year in transactions for basic supplies and services—from legal fees to gas—that federal workers use in the course of business. They aren’t allowed to use their own credit cards for work-related expenses, a source told Fortune.
The Elon Musk–led push for government cost-cutting has come for federal workers’ credit cards, hampering workers’ ability to buy basic supplies, according to several media reports.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency last month boasted about eliminating thousands of credit cards and reducing the spending limits on others to $1. Now, many employees are saying they can’t make routine purchases to fulfill their duties, multiple outlets reported.
“Divisions are resorting to bartering with each other to obtain needed items,” one employee at the Environmental Protection Agency told Wired. The unnamed worker described being unable to buy liquid nitrogen, which is used to store environmental samples in EPA freezers.
The EPA and DOGE did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
Credit cards are used for many routine purchases in the course of federal workers’ jobs, including gas for cars used on the job, lab supplies, software subscriptions, or work-related travel.
“I think it is going to be chaotic,” said Jessica Childress, founder of the Childress Firm and a former lawyer for the Department of Justice. “It’s going to put a complete halt on essential functions that the government has to complete if there is no card that a government employee can use to pay for travel that’s part of their jobs.”
Childress noted that federal workers aren’t allowed to put work-related expenses on personal cards.
“These cards are the ways that many government workers are performing the duties they’ve taken an oath to perform,” she added. “It facilitates the ability of these employees to do their jobs.”
Social Security employees have been unable to create UPS shipping labels after their cards were limited, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. Meanwhile, lawyers at the Treasury Department have been cut off from PACER, the electronic filing system widely used to monitor federal court cases. (That access was later restored, the Journal reported.)
Another federal employee told the Journal they weren’t able to pay cell phone plans, Microsoft 365 software licenses, or a $619 monthly bill for Amazon Web Services.
One employee at the Food and Drug Administration recently tried to put in an order for pipette tips, a basic lab item, Wired reported. However, that order was put on hold. “Now we are running out, asking colleagues at other offices to share what they might not be using,” the employee told Wired.
Trump’s executive order on Feb. 26 decreed that “all credit cards held by agency employees shall be treated as frozen for 30 days,” except for those used for disaster relief. (The order exempted law enforcement, the military, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.) DOGE posted last week that some 24,000 credit cards had been deactivated. The General Services Administration confirmed the changes in a February blog post on the charge-card program, known as SmartPay.
“GSA set a $1 limit on all cardholder accounts. This action is a commonly used risk mitigation best practice,” the post read. “GSA has implemented a review and approval process to ensure that purchases that directly support mission-critical activities can still be made in a timely manner.”
Before the changes, GSA had boasted about the SmartPay program, which it called the world’s largest charge card program.
“If you’ve ever traveled for work, fueled a government vehicle, or purchased something for less than $10,000 for your office or agency, chances are you used the GSA SmartPay program,” it said in a blog post. Some $30 billion in government transactions are run through the program every year. In its 25-year life span, the program has returned $5.6 billion in “cash back” to agencies, GSA said.
