DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards

[koch]

I'm reminded of the story of the Air Force designing cockpits for the "average" pilot, only to find that

> out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions [0]

Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed. And surely, most government employees don't need to purchase things on a daily basis, so we can inhibit their credit card use. And most contracts about XYZ aren't crucial, so we can cancel them.

But, my goodness, there is so much nuance and breadth to the things a government does, let alone the government that is responsible for the largest military and that props up a big part of the world economy, that compounding these rash decisions will have far-reaching and serious blowback. I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?

The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair, the engines have been turned off, and we're just gliding now. Gliding or falling, anyway

[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

[alaithea]

Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.

[duxup]

I worked for a company that at one point was worried about wasteful expenses.

Eventually to solve this resulted in a system where a $40 pizza lunch went to a committee of completely disconnected morons who debated it and would then forward it to a VP to make the final call. Probably a couple thousands in time costs with the paperwork and people time involved … for $40 of pizza. Oh and they had lunch while they debated.

I got an email from the committee once, I told them to forget it and I would buy my team pizza with my own money…. they actually tried to get me in trouble for that.

These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.

Thankfully we were bought and the new CEO did away with it.

[lenerdenator]

That's the point.

These are people who want to prove, regardless of anything, that government is less efficient than private enterprises... particularly their private enterprises, who would be happy to help you with your problem, dear citizen, for a nominal fee.

[TheCoelacanth]

Even dumber than that. The cards are there to make sure that the federal government doesn't pay state taxes.

This is literally going to cost the government more money.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

No. Now workers will not spend the $50 on office supplies, either paying for them out of their own pocket, or doing without.

Either way, they're saving $50, either by stealing it from the employees who'd rather pay themselves to be able to do their job, or by causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the productivity because someone spends 2 hours hunting for an unused pen instead of just grabbing one from the supply box in the corner.

[eitally]

This is the equivalent level of pettiness as removing free coffee from offices.

[rgbrgb]

Worth noting that it is not at all dumb if your objective is to degrade the power and effectiveness of the US government. There are effective people in charge this time who know exactly what they're doing here.

[reaperducer]

Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.

Sounds like my company.

It finally got rid of the travel agency contract, so for my meeting last week I ended up spending $600 in salary hours making my own arrangements so the company could save a $50 commission to a travel agent.

Penny wise and pound foolish.

[TZubiri]

This argument exists even if there is no bureocratic process for the purchase, assuming that the purchase is not done.

Suppose a 500$ monthly expense for taxi, where the employees need to use public transport in its absence. Or a software tool that saves 1 hour per week, and costs 20$/ month.

In both cases the employees need to spend more time and the costs are reduced.

But the salary cost is fixed (for the most part, whatever cuts where possible were already done), so the workload goes up in this phase. And I'm assuming they are just trying to crack the whip.

It's just a typical business management tactic of reducing costs, and maximizing workload per employee, (and increasing income usually, but in this case I think they'll translate it to reduced income as tax cuts, the increased income is for the private sector)

At least that's my take, pretty straightforward.

[jeroenhd]

Placing back the red tape and requiring everyone to follow the rules is step one in a malicious takeover. It makes everything slow and inefficient, making every department fail their objectives and deadlines, providing an invented basis for reducing/upending/replacing/getting rid of whatever policy/program/department you want to get rid of.

The goal isn't to reduce spending. It's to create bad press to get rid of parts of the government that get in the way of the cronies in charge.

[Terr_]

We had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers.

The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.

[asah]

there's a bit of legit thinking that it'll scare employees into not charging things, to avoid the paperwork...

[ChrisRR]

Dumbest change so far*

[ryandrake]

It’s almost as if, instead of “rooting out waste and corruption,” they are really just griefing workers, doing all sorts of big and small things to make their lives uncertain and miserable…

If they were really attacking waste, why haven’t they so much as made a peep about military spending?

[duxup]

DODGE is that new middle manager who thinks they know how everything works but doesn’t… and isn’t smart enough to ask.

[digitaltrees]

A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success. The conservative opposition with shrinking government and making it ineffective is profound error that will make it harder to start and grow businesses, invest in innovation and compete on the world stage. We should be working to have the best government in the world not the smallest.

[ModernMech]

This is one thing that has always confounded me about conservatives. America is really number one in a lot of ways. The awful terrible bloated government they complain about has fostered the best university system in the world, the best companies in the world, massive wealth, an invincible military, a dominant position on the world stage, the world's reserve currency... and they want to throw a wrench in the machine that produced those results? Is #1 economy not good enough??

[ChrisRR]

I wouldn't say highly competent. Even at its best the US has such a tribalistic view of politics that has held back so many improvements

[toephu2]

> A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success.

I doubt this. Do you really think the government is the reason Silicon Valley has been so successful? Sure the government created the internet, but after that many tech companies flourished in Silicon Valley with very little regulation. I think that's why America has been so successful. If you look at anything the government gets its hands in, costs sky rocket (education, healthcare, etc).

[adamredwoods]

Guess what? You can see all this information, because of government transparency (not DOGE):

https://smartpay.gsa.gov/about/statistics/

>> GSA SmartPay statistics for fiscal year 2024:

    $39.7 billion in total program spend.
    $506 million in refunds earned by agencies/organizations.
    $441 was spent on average for each transaction.

[andrewflnr]

Having used a government credit card as a federal employee, I can tell you this: If you actually cared about government efficiency, you would make those credit cards easier to use, not harder. I guess I was relatively sheltered, but for the time I was involved with it, doing the paperwork for that goddamn credit card was by far the most frustrating part of my job, and I didn't even use it that much.

[lapcat]

The cruelty is the point. Never forget that simple but sharp observation. The point is to make an example of federal workers. They are the scapegoats now. Every power grab needs scapegoats to justify the power grab. The more the scapegoats suffer hardships, the better. It has to be public humiliation.

[azan_]

I wonder what effect DOGE will have on attracting talent to government jobs. It was already challenging to recruit qualified individuals to government positions; with these changes, I believe the situation will worsen significantly.

[donmcc]

It's already standard in many agencies for employee credit cards (IBAa or individually billed accounts) to have their spending limit set to $1 when the employee is not traveling. When travel is approved, the spending limit is temporarily raised based on the estimated travel costs. These cards are mainly used for hotel and rental car charges; federal employees are given a per-diem reimbursement when traveling to cover meals and incidentals, which they pay out of their own pocket. You can see per diem rates at https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates . This move seems like something that makes a great sound bite but isn't actually a problem.

[amelius]

This whole situation makes me think of a child who says "If I were president for a day, I would ..."

[wewewedxfgdf]

I felt a great disturbance in The Force, like a million SAAS and cloud companies crying out.

[averageRoyalty]

I'm not American, but it seems this has been going for weeks now. Are these changes/this access to various things actually impacting normal Americans at all? I understand the impact on government workers, but I'm curious if this is actually changing peoples lives in any way.

We were barraged for 6 months about how Twitter would fall over the next day when Elon took over there and took a radical stance, and it just didn't. I'm curious if this will be similar.

[9283409232]

There is a part of me that occasionally checks in to see if people are realizing they are getting conned yet. Musk is trying to sell critical government functions to his buddies in the Founder's Fund and a16z by literally making the government more inefficient. Burying the government in paperwork has been the Republican dream for decades.

[LorenDB]

https://archive.ph/k1EdO

[asah]

what about gas cards for postal workers and other delivery people?

https://www.google.com/search?q=gas+charge+cards+postal+work...

[insane_dreamer]

Step 1. Cut gov payroll by 30%. Save $X per year. Claim victory. Praise Trump!

Step 2. Hire consulting companies like Bain to provide services previously provided by the gov, at a higher price. Spend $X * 1.5 (if you're lucky) per year. But by then, the public has moved on to some headline-grabbing news (invading Canada, or Greenland, etc.), and the budget increase is buried on page 4.

Scamming the American public.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

Why do government employees have credit cards? When i was in the Air Force, we had GPC cards but honestly it was easier to just pay out of pocket and get reimbursed when i had to travel for training. The Air force took care of flights and i just had to pay for hotels and food and they gave me X per day based on location.

Seems like a smart move to just remove the GPC program in general. you can spend up to 10K with literally no competition requirements... Seems like there is alot of room for fraud, waste and abuse there. Better to reduce red tape for procurement and have a more centralized purchasing manager coordinate like every company does.

[FollowingTheDao]

This is yet another thing that will help bring on a recession/depression. First they create unemployment and lower spending from the layoffs. Now anyone left cannot spend money. What effect do they think that will have on the economy?

[xracy]

It's hard for me to imagine that the software built around this isn't just going to start crashing with enough of these changes. You've given a handful of (generously) junior engineers access to decade+ old software and they've just started changing things willy nilly. There will be downstream effects of this that software stops they're putting in place just stop working.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone changes this accidentally in a way that a limit like this is by-passable with minimal effort in the coming weeks (if not already).

[beachy]

If a piece of software crashes in the forest, and no-one is around to hear it, did it really crash at all?