Amid sweeping layoffs, the Defense Department has thrown its civilian workforce into further uncertainty after it paused all travel and placed a $1 spending limit on all government purchase cards, effectively making them useless.
The Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire and White House advisor Elon Musk, started looking into purchase cards last month — it estimated that the federal government had 4.6 million active federal credit cards, which exceeds the number of civilian employees across the government.
On Tuesday, Musk said DOGE canceled over 200,000 credit cards across 16 agencies, emphasizing that these audits are just the beginning.
“Even after canceling 200k, there are still twice as many government credit cards as there are government employees!” Musk said on social platform X.
Shauna Weatherly, president and founder of Federal Subcontract Solutions, said the claim that there are more cards than employees is “simply not true” — there are around 700,000 active purchase cards. Plus, many federal employees are issued travel cards because government policy prohibits the use of personal credit cards for official expenses.
“The government wants to get those refunds on the travel. They want to get the tax-exempt status on the travel, so they don’t have to pay taxes, and then go chase after it and try to recoup taxes. There are those benefits to having the card, and that’s why those people have them,” Weatherly told Federal News Network.
The GSA SmartPay Credit Card, government-wide charge card program run by the General Services Administration, manages the majority of government credit cards, including the purchase and travel cards. SmartPay also covers fleet-related expenses, such as fuel, maintenance and repair costs.
These cards provide tax savings on eligible expenses, secure online transactions and financial oversight tools that help minimize the risk of fraud and misuse.
“Some of the myths are that there’s fraud, waste and abuse on those cards. As somebody who has trained the government, who has used the card over the years, who’s overseen programs — typically, there are errors in the use of a card, but never fraud. Or there are transactions that may be flagged because they appear to be off. Most of the time, those are very rare. They’re very small. And again, the average card purchase is only $441 on the purchase card,” said Weatherly.
These cards are closely monitored through automated fraud detection tools, layered oversight and regular audits to prevent misuse. Each cardholder is responsible for reconciling their charges in the agency’s financial system, then their supervisor must approve the transaction. On top of that, program coordinators conduct monthly or random audits.
“Those purchases aren’t done in a vacuum, where the employee just says, ‘I need to buy pencils.’ The fraud is very low. People don’t understand that there are such layers of checks and balances in that program, that things get caught very quickly,” said Weatherly.
The Defense Department heavily relies on these purchase cards; they are used to buy mission-essential supplies, pay for maintenance, emergency repairs, tools, equipment and spare parts. Research and development teams at DoD-affiliated labs and universities use these cards to buy materials for experiments and prototyping.
Weatherly said when she ran the card program at the Army Corps of Engineers, the staff managing parks, lakes and outdoor recreation sites were among primary card holders.
“They had the card so that they could buy life vests because they ran a lake, and boating season was coming up. They needed to have ropes to tow stranded boats out from the lake, or they needed to have life vests in case somebody fell in the water. I’m just thinking they can’t afford to stop and go, ‘May I please have $50 to buy some rope.’ That’s where we are at,” said Weatherly.
The purchase card freeze is already bringing research programs to a halt as they rely on flexible, short-term purchasing, only buying what they need and adapting to their evolving projects. The Washington Post reported that the card freeze has already disrupted research and development efforts focused on lifesaving protective gear for military personnel.
The Department of Veterans Affairs also relies heavily on government purchase cards — it spends nearly $6 billion annually on its purchase cards for supplies and equipment needed to provide health care to veterans.
“What the GSA SmartPay contract was meant to do was to give agencies a menu of things that they could choose from that are tailored to their programs. That’s the purpose of it. It’s not meant to dictate how buying gets done. It is meant to be one of those best-in-class solutions,” said Weatherly.
The DoD’s travel pause is already disrupting permanent change of station moves, and while some of the issues can be resolved quickly, the travel card freeze adds unnecessary delays and administrative burden.
“It’s time that never had to be taken before. I feel like there’s more cost involved because of the time spent than there has been in the past. Travel cards were reliable cards,” said Weatherly.
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