President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday requiring government payments and travel expenses to be justified and made public where possible.
The requirement is part of Trump’s executive order to implement the cost efficiency initiative for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Using modern technology, the order aims to transform spending by putting all federal grants and contracts through rigorous standards to justify their existence. Trump’s order will have federal agencies acting immediately, reviewing all contracts and grants for waste, fraud and abuse.
Travel expenses and government payments are also being analyzed closely, as they must be justified and made public if possible.
The order also tells agencies to treat their credit cards as if they were frozen for 30 days.
‘To the maximum extent permitted by law, all credit cards held by agency employees shall be treated as frozen for 30 days from the date of this order, except for any credit cards held by employees engaged in, or charges related to employees utilizing such credit cards for, disaster relief or natural disaster response benefits or operations or other critical services as determined by the Agency Head, and subject to such additional individualized or categorical exceptions as the Agency Head, in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, deems appropriate,’ Trump’s executive order reads.
Working with DOGE, agency heads will review and terminate any contracts deemed unnecessary.
Additionally, the executive order will look at how the government manages property, requiring the General Services Administration to submit a plan for disposing of unnecessary owned or leased properties.
Trump’s order is being implemented to add ‘discipline to a wasteful system.’
‘The existing system fails to safeguard taxpayer dollars or promote merit among contractors and grant recipients,’ White House officials said in a fact sheet, noting that the government spends large sums of money on contracts and grants.
The sheet also notes that in fiscal year 2023, the government committed about $759 billion in contracts.
‘This flood of spending historically had minimal safeguards,’ the fact sheet read. ‘In the Biden Administration, GSA directed its efforts to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) rather than merit and efficiency.’
Since his return to the Oval Office, Trump has set sort of a wildfire on federal government spending, unleashing DOGE, which is led by billionaire Elon Musk.
According to the DOGE website, the total estimated savings as of Tuesday were $65 billion, which is a combination of fraud detection and deletion, contract and lease cancelations, contract and lease renegotiation, asset sales, grant cancelations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes and regulatory savings. The site is updated two times a week.
The DOGE site also has a ‘Wall of Receipts,’ showing a breakdown of how much was saved and where the savings were found.
