The Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) issued a new update in its ongoing audit of government credit cards. This has been a major focus for the department, and DOGE has issued updates on its findings weekly on X. Their most recent post, made on March 11, 2025, announced the cancellation of over 200,000 government credit cards.
According to their post, DOGE has launched a pilot program with 16 federal agencies to audit unused cards. They say that while hundreds of thousands of credit cards have been deactivated, millions more need to be deactivated. Elon Musk, who heads up the department, made his own post, emphasizing the scale of the problem.
“Weekly Credit Card Update! Pilot program with 16 agencies to audit unused/unneeded credit cards. After 3 weeks, >200,000 cards have been de-activated. Great progress this past week by @HHSGov @Interior As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts, so still more work to do,” explained the official DOGE X account.
Elon Musk replied to the original post with his own message: “Even after canceling 200k, there are still twice as many government credit cards as there are government employees!” said the South African Billionaire. This is not the only time DOGE or Musk have addressed the issue. On February 18, 2025, DOGE made another post that quantified the massive amount of waste.
DOGE clarified that millions of federal credit cards have billions in charges. “The US government currently has ~4.6M active credit cards/accounts, which processed ~90M unique transactions for ~$40B of spend in FY24. DOGE is working with the agencies to simplify the program and reduce admin costs—we will report back in one week,” the agency explained.
DOGE acts on the president’s authority, and Trump directly addressed this issue in one of his executive orders. The EO, titled IMPLEMENTING THE PRESIDENT’S “DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY” COST EFFICIENCY INITIATIVE, was released on February 26, 202,5 and gave DOGE sweeping authority. Trump singled out credit cards as being a special area for attention.
“To the maximum extent permitted by law, all credit cards held by agency employees shall be treated as frozen for 30 days from the date of this order,” Trump ordered. However, the president carved out an exception, “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.”
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The American Tribune reported on Musk’s strong commitment to reforming the government. While on the campaign trail, he made a statement illustrating the “staggering” waste of taxpayers’ dollars at the federal level, which DOGE is now seeking to correct. “The amount of waste that happens with the federal government is really staggering. It’s a staggering amount of taxpayer money,” he said.
“We have to say, Well, what does this do for the citizens of America? How is this good for people in America? That’s it’s their money,” he said, emphasizing that government must serve the taxpayers. “For some weird reason, a lot of people in the state, or whatever the politicians, they seem to forget that money being spent is, is your money.”
“And if it’s not spending, being spent in a way that is beneficial to the American people, it’s a misuse of the funds. I mean, there’s this, there’s a lot of money that’s being spent where we’re sort of illegals are getting more benefits than citizens like that that doesn’t make any sense,” Musk said, further highlighting vast problems at hand.
Watch Musk below: