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.
Musk’s $1 cap: the bureaucratic equivalent of giving a surgeon a spork for brain surgery.
🐱
It’s bizarre to me that Trump, who talks like he has imperial ambitions, is dismantling the services that run the empire. I can’t tell if he’s senile and being completely puppeteered by Musk, or if he’s lucid but just actually has no idea what any of these agencies do and why it’s in his interest as president to keep them working.
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:
2002 report from the Department of Commerce said that, “by avoiding the formal procurement process, GSA estimates the annual savings to be $1.2 billion.”
With inflation that would now be something like $2.1 billion. So the whole thing is costing money.
Have a friend who works for a federal department that deals with disaster response. They have workers that travel extensively. Apparently Musk froze their company credit cards that they use for transportation, food, and hotels WHILE many of them were in the field.
Apparently someone close enough to Musk pointed out how fucking stupid this actually was and he had to reverse it so they weren’t stranded thousands of miles from home.
These fucktard traitors have exactly zero clue what they’re doing and their actions make them enemies of the United States of America.
Put this unelected immigrant in a hole in Guantanamo.
To say that they don’t have a clue is wishful thinking. They are systematically dismantling democracy, USA is on a fast track to oligarchy. There won’t be another vote if something unexpected does not happen.
Edit. Was rather thinking about those judges and congress getting upper hand. But if they are being threatened, it lessens the odds
They fucked the US embassy compound in Sudan, effectively shut off their power, water, and food. I’m not sure if that’s been fixed yet.
I’ve heard that National Parks have been unable to buy supplies like toilet paper because of this.
Damn, what the fuck. He turned the USA into a 3rd world country in less than 60 days. And I bet this dependencies are all gonna get privatized.
