Call this the Dollar Tree Policy. Or the Robocop Policy, if you're more cinematically minded:

Donald Trump promised to actually cut spending in Washington, and the DOGE effort already shows how seriously he took that pledge. However, DOGE didn't just have USAID or grant programs on their radar screen. They also took aim at bureaucrats with government-issued credit cards, with the aim of bringing their discretionary spending to an abrupt halt. The Wall Street Journal reported on the new one-dollar limit that many may have discovered the hard way:

For much of the federal workforce, pulling out a government credit card during the workday comes with a new refrain: “Your card has been declined.”

By placing a $1 spending limit on most government credit cards, the Trump administration has rendered them functionally useless. The move effectively freezes federally issued plastic for 30 days as part of adviser Elon Musk’s efforts to reduce government spending. The change in policy is affecting workers’ ability to pay for office supplies, travel expenses and equipment, according to interviews with employees, forcing managers to secure exemptions.

In other words, no one gets to spend anything without approval from the top. The one-dollar limit is a stroke of genius; the White House could have cancelled all the cards, but then reissuing them as needed would have been a major headache. This way the credit lines are all still in place, but just capped at a level where even a pack of gum might end up getting flagged. 

How many people found this out the hard way? Well, the General Services Administration sent out an e-mail to all federal workers warning them of the change on February 22nd -- a Saturday, one will recall. However, bureaucrats have complained about being expected to read e-mails over the weekend, and one has to wonder whether this was yet another "pulse check" among managers with expense accounts in the same way that Elon Musk's "five bullet points" memo was to everyone else in the executive branch. 

Speaking of Musk, this action got ordered by Trump directly in an EO last week. It directs an end to "nonessential travel" as well as the credit-card limit under direct presidential authority. Disaster-relief managers are exempted from this order and the agency heads can approve exceptions too, but they aren't alone. Trump looped in the DOGE team to oversee exception requests, presumably so that the data scientists could determine both necessity and potential duplication. That likely resulted from the DOGE exposure of an absurd number of subscriptions to high-cost newsletters within single agencies, which almost certainly involved business credit cards.

The WSJ focuses on the disruptions to business as usual, but even then it appears DOGE has been reasonably responsive:

At least some credit cards for Federal Aviation Administration personnel had the $1 limit, making it difficult for some employees to make purchases for government business, people familiar with the matter said. Some managers inside the FAA were left figuring out how to unfreeze credit cards needed for travel related to technology upgrades, one of the people said. 

On Friday morning, lawyers at the Treasury Department were informed that access to the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, which they use to monitor litigation, had been paused.

“The purchase card used to pay for PACER transactions is frozen. Given this situation, we cannot allow additional transaction charges to accrue on PACER,” said an email viewed by the Journal. Hours later, their access was restored, according to a person familiar with the decision.

The big question here is why PACER access and FAA tech upgrades are being handled by individual action. Those should be handled on an enterprise basis, not with individual subscriptions except where absolutely necessary. Every private-sector corporation performs this kind of scrutiny over enterprise-wide operations eventually, for both cost and efficiency. Why should government be any different? And if it only took "hours" to resolve the PACER access issue, it hardly sounds like an emergency or an impossible barrier to work.

All of this aims at bringing accountability as well as efficiency to the federal bureaucracy. The shrieking over those efforts -- overdue by decades -- demonstrates the arrogance of bureaucrats and their allies in the media. If bureaucrats can't justify their spending, then they shouldn't be spending at all. And that is exactly what the American public has wanted for a very long time, and what they expect Trump to deliver. If that makes bureaucrats unhappy, well ... we'll buy that for a dollar.

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show features:

•  What will Donald Trump tell a joint session of Congress tonight? 
• Andrew Malcolm and I game out the potential asks and points for Trumpian triumphalism. The border will almost certainly be a big topic for the latter. 
• We also wonder what lessons Democrats are learning -- and which lessons they aren't. 

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!