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:
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.
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The only thing Musk seems to know well is he has a dick and it makes babies.
Nothing else is as important as that.
Edit … they may be all IVF but he still needs a dick to get sperm into the jar.
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Pretty sure they’re all in vitro
Yeah, I came in to say exactly this. The typical contracting process usually involves reaching out to multiple vendors, (usually a minimum of three, including at least one Historically Underutilized Business), soliciting quotes from all of them, waiting for quotes to come back, deciding on the best quote (and being able to justify it if you didn’t pick the cheapest one), and then going through the entire invoicing process with the selected vendor.
With a p-card, you can just walk into the local office supply store, swipe your p-card, and be done with it. Or better yet, just order it online using the account that the contractor has already set up via the aforementioned bidding process, and have it delivered in a day. But needing to go through the entire contractor process for every single purchase will quickly cripple any office.
There is going to be a whole mess of UCC ratifications from all this. I would hate to be a CO right now dealing with all that paperwork.
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.
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.
Put this unelected immigrant in a hole
in Guantanamo.
“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,”
Yes. That’s why they did it.
I’m just hoping he pisses off enough of the wrong people to get into actual deep shit and actually face real consequences for once in his pampered life.
Loyalists have been placed in every position of power in Trump’s last term and Biden ignored them because he works for the same billionaires.
The only chance of stopping this is community organized revolution.
Or somebody just gives him a jihad hug when he steps out of his limo
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.
Can also confirm. Do business with the NIH and they are unable to purchase anything with credit cards and want to switch over to purchase orders… which aren’t being paid either.
They’re running a death cult.
Most of the actions of Trump and his followers seem like real-world satire. Maybe someone should tell Trump and Musk that they are not in a TV show…
People still think they’re somehow just inept. No they’re actively trying to destroy the American state on behalf of Putin.
Definitely - for their own fun and profit!
For a while at least, attorneys at treasury were not allowed to use PACER because it charges nominal amounts per page to fund the Judicial branch. PACER is the one and only tool for researching and filing records in ongoing federal cases, which is to say, every single case that these lawyers would be working on.
It’s kinda bullshit that there is a fee at all, but it is what it is and has been standard operating procedure for 20+ years, and they just flip a switch and wait for the howling to begin, because they have no idea what is important and don’t care. This is just Xitter all over again, except now it’s the government of the largest economy and military in the world.
