Growing credit card debt is a problem that affects more than just the ordinary populace. According to DOGE, a government auditing agency purportedly created by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, even federal government personnel in the US deal with the same problem.
The Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) official social media account recently announced that 30 agencies are now part of its program to audit unnecessary and underused credit cards. Additionally, it said that approximately 470,000 credit cards had been deactivated after seven weeks.
In the same post, DOGE further points out that there were around 4.6 million active cards and accounts at the start of the audit; therefore, there is still more work to do.
Number of cards issued
The number of credit cards issued by several US government agencies, such as the Farm Credit Administration, Export-Import Bank, National Science Foundation, and Department of Defense, is also included in the post.
These cards are divided into two categories: purchase cards and travel cards. The post shared data for both categories.
For example, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had 12,488 purchase cards and 67,376 travel cards before the pause, according to the data.
The Department of the Interior had 20,998 purchase cards and 56,909 travel cards before the audit. Treasury employees were issued 3,459 purchase cards and 51,348 travel cards. The Department of Transportation had 84,268 purchase cards and 38,924 travel cards.
Elon Musk called these numbers “crazy” in response to DOGE’s post. He wrote, “Twice as many credit cards are issued and active than the total number of government employees! Crazy.”
DOGE using AI
In other news, two persons with knowledge of the situation told Reuters that Elon Musk’s DOGE team is allegedly employing artificial intelligence to monitor the communications of at least one federal agency in an effort to express animosity for President Donald Trump and his objectives.
Although there is still a lot of mystery surrounding Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the surveillance would be a remarkable application of technology to spot signs of alleged disloyalty in a workforce already being upended by widespread layoffs and drastic cost-cutting.
Another person with firsthand knowledge of the situation claims that the DOGE team is also communicating via the Signal app, which may be against federal record-keeping regulations because messages can be configured to expire after a certain amount of time.
