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 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.
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.”
