In an earth-shaking interview on “The Alex Marlow Show,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) exposed wasteful spending on government credit cards by revealing that the federal government has 4.6 million active GSA credit card accounts, nearly double the number of federal employees. The Republican senator explained how many of the charges on these cards occur during federal holidays, such as Sundays, for pay-per-view events like UFC fights, and cash withdrawals at casino ATMs.
For context, DOGE has been attacking the unaccountable federal credit card spending issue. As we reported, DOGE took 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.”
Providing further context, DOGE acts on the president’s explicit 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, 2025, and gave DOGE sweeping authority, and singled out credit cards as being a special area for attention.
Explaining his vision for the investigation, Trump said, “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.” 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.”
Starting off her remarks, Ernst explained her interest in this issue. She said, “Now, if you go to the DOGE website, you can see all of the work that they are doing from the administration side. We’re trying to do our own messaging from our caucuses in the Senate and the House, but with the GSA credit cards.”
Describing her involvement, the Iowa Republican stated, “I’ve spoken to Elon Musk about this. I’ve spoken to Steve Davis, you know, his chief operating officer, about this, and got an update from them right now, the federal government, through GSA credit cards, has 4.6 million active credit cards and accounts.”
Explaining the scale of the waste, she added, “Okay, well, we have a little less than half that number in federal employees. So we’re trying to figure out where the heck all of these credit cards are, and what we have found is that there’s a huge amount of fraud and abuse within the credit card system.”
"*" indicates required fields
Providing specific examples, Senator Ernst said, “So think about all the federal holidays that we have most of the time. Most of the federal employees I know are not working on these federal holidays, say New Year’s Eve. But guess when a lot of those credit cards are used? They’re used on New Year’s Eve, where nightclubs, bars, yeah, Sunday afternoons, okay, big UFC fight or something, you know, pay per view.”
Watch the clip here:
Concluding her remarks, she added, “So I mean, we’re catching a lot of this. There’s cash withdrawals and ATMs at casinos. So my question is, why was nobody auditing, auditing the statements and calling into question all of these purchases, all of the withdrawals, why on earth do we have so many credit cards?”
Featured image from embedded video