In a groundbreaking appearance on Fox News, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) provided a massive update on the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) plan to reduce credit card fraud within federal agencies. Lummis reported that DOGE has uncovered severe waste, such as some agencies with “twice as many credit cards outstanding as there were employees.”
For context, DOGE, acting on President Trump’s mandate, has been investigating the misuse of federal government credit cards as part of its mission to cut waste and inefficiency. During the investigation, DOGE discovered that the U.S. government has 4.6 million active credit cards, which produced around 90 million transactions totaling nearly $40 billion in spending.
As we reported, DOGE to X on March 11, 2025, to issue an update on the audacious program. It said, “Weekly Credit Card Update! Pilot program with 16 agencies to audit unused/unneeded credit cards. After 3 weeks, >200,000 cards have been deactivated. 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.”
In any case, Sen. Lummis exposed the massive scale of federal credit card fraud during a February 28, 2025, interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. Prominent conservative influencer Paul A. Szypula posted a clip of the interview to X, and it gathered thousands of likes and comments.
Beginning her remarks, Lumis explained how “DOGE is finding things that any business under control, but the federal government does not. Let me give you a couple of examples. They found an agency that had twice as many credit cards outstanding as there were employees at the agency.”
Building on that point, the conservative senator explored other concerning examples of government waste. Sen. Lummis added, “They have found fields on computers that say where is this payment being made to and to whom is it being made for what, and those fields are empty; they’ve never been filled out. Money’s outgoing; we don’t know where it’s going, and it is not the worst of business practices, and it’s happening with billions of taxpayer dollars.”
Interjecting with her own anecdotes, Maria Bartiromo expressed her shock. The Fox Business host said, “Yeah, I was reading that, that there were like more than four million credit cards or something, and there were two and a half or three million people working in government. How is that possible? People had dual credit cards, and then they were using those credit cards for what? Transport and trips and things like that?”
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Responding, Lummis stated that this lack of accountability is unique to federal bureaucrats. She explained, “That’s just it, Maria. We don’t know when I was state treasurer in Wyoming, the auditors would come into my office at the end of every fiscal year, and they were there for three months because I managed all the money of the state of Wyoming.”
Concluding her remarks, the senator stressed how important DOGE is to a prosperous country. She said, “We don’t to the federal government, and there’s absolutely no excuse for the irresponsible handling of U.S. taxpayer dollars. That’s what Elon Musk is looking at. He is finding waste, fraud, and abuse, and it’s extensive.”
Watch the stunning clip here:
Featured image from embedded video