Last month, the Trump administration placed a $1 spending limit on most government-issued credit cards that federal employees use to cover travel and work expenses. The impacts are already widely felt.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists aren’t able to order equipment used to repair ships and radars. At the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), laboratories are experiencing delays in ordering basic supplies. At the National Park Service, employees are canceling trips to oversee crucial maintenance work. And at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), employees worry that mission-critical projects could be stalled. In many cases, employees are already unable to carry out the basic functions of their job.
“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,” says a USDA official who was granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis.
So to give people some additional context on why this is a nightmare. Currently in contracting we have something called the Micro purchase threshold, which is $10k for supplies or $2500 for services. This is what the government was allowed to buy on a government purchase credit card with minimum paperwork (it’s regularly audited but doesn’t need to go through the whole contracting process, which is a lengthy process). Removing the credit cards has meant buying something like office supplies is no longer a quick Amazon buy, it is now something that will take over a month as they fill out tons of documents and some poor contract Specialist and contracting officer will have to go through all the contracting steps. This is aggressively inefficient and expensive. It is by far the dumbest thing this jack ass has done. ~source me, a poor contract Specialist who now has to do an unholy amount of micro purchases.
In the article they say:
With inflation that would now be something like $2.1 billion. So the whole thing is costing money.