Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has cut up more than 500,000 federal credit cards across 32 government agencies, marking a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to slash wasteful government spending.
The deactivations target what DOGE calls “unused/unneeded” credit cards from the General Services Administration’s SmartPay system, which handled $39.7 billion in spending across more than 90 million transactions during the last fiscal year.
This represents a substantial increase from the $32.8 billion spent in FY2022, a nearly $7 billion jump in just two years.
“The program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has been expanded to 32 agencies. After 10 weeks, more than 500K cards have been deactivated,” DOGE announced in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. “As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts, so still more work to do.”
The initiative, which began in March with 200,000 suspensions across 16 agencies, has now more than doubled. Created through an executive order when President Donald Trump returned to office in January, DOGE was tasked with reducing workforce size and eliminating inefficiencies in federal operations.
The Trump administration has framed the initiative as part of a broader effort to curb fraud and eliminate wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars.
With over 4 million government credit cards still active, DOGE has indicated that additional cuts will continue as it pushes toward what it calls a “more streamlined federal financial system.”
The ongoing credit card audit represents one of the most visible actions taken by DOGE since its creation and signals the administration’s commitment to its campaign promises of dramatically reducing the size and cost of the federal government.