The 'credit card update' that made Elon Musk go 'crazy'

Tesla CEO and Donald Trump’s close aide Elon Musk has recently shared an X post, highlighting a striking difference between the number of credit cards issued and the total number of government employees. The tech billionaire quoted a post by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) stating that the U.S. government has issued 4.6 million active credit cards, twice the number of its 2.1 million federal employees (as of 2023 data from the Office of Personnel Management), suggesting potential misuse or oversight failures.
“Credit Card Update! The program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has been expanded to 30 agencies. After 7 weeks, ~470k cards have been de-activated. As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts, so still more work to do,” reads a post by DOGE.
Musk responded to DOGE’s post, saying “Twice as many credit cards are issued and active than the total number of government employees! Crazy.”


The post ties to DOGE’s audit which has already deactivated 4,70,000 cards across 30 agencies. In March only, the agency confirmed that it de-activated over 2 lakh US government credit cards.

In February this year, DOGE announced that it is working with federal agencies to simplify how credit cards are managed and that it aims to cut down on costs. The agency then said that the federal government had 4.6 million credit cards in use during the 2024 fiscal year, with 90 million individual purchases made.
As part of the changes, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for a “transformation in Federal spending.” This order included a 30-day pause on the use of credit cards by federal employees. The pause impacted many agencies, including the GSA, Department of Education, NASA, the Treasury Department, and others.
According to experts, freezing and deactivation of government credit cards may cause delays in daily operations, further adding that the actual benefits of the decision remain unclear.