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- cross-posted to:
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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.
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Musk’s $1 cap: the bureaucratic equivalent of giving a surgeon a spork for brain surgery.
🐱
Spork probably cost 2$ now maybe a toothpick.
They’re running a death cult.
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.
Yeah, that is because Musk is an idiot and p-cards actually help give more transparency (better reporting) and helps ensure alignment to budgets, approved spending limits, approved vendors, etc. So, like the total opposite of a typical credit card. lol
Considering that Musk doesn’t seem to know much beyond the surface layer of anything, I doubt he even knows the differences between a p-card and a regular credit card, and how they actually help control (ensuring alignment to right budget line items, approved spending limits, etc.) and report on spending. Dumb ass.
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.
Actually, his allegedly mangled dick might not make babies. supposedly, they are all IVF or surrogate.
Pretty sure they’re all in vitro
He had a botched dick surgery from a"doctor"
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.
EfFiCiEnCy
Have worked in civil service and dealt with the procurement process in the past. You are 100% correct.
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.
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
Removed by mod
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.
I’ve heard that National Parks have been unable to buy supplies like toilet paper because of this.
everyone should just start shitting on teslas!
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.
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.
that’s not the empire he’s rooting for
He doesn’t care as long as he gets to be the man behind the desk. He’s a manbaby. Elon is the one actually running things. There’s pictures of Elon talking to the cabinet while Trump is asleep and any time a cabinet member pushes back against a DOGE directive Trump backs up Elon. What Elon wants is for the government to be utterly shattered so he can rebuild it as a private entity.
Krasnov is doing what is ordered. Dismantling the USA. Just like his handlers want.
I think there were some really dark or embarrassing things in his twitter dms that Musk is holding over his head. Plus he is a malicious idiot who can’t comprehend spending resources to help other people.
Not just Musk, but I suspect he’s being puppeteered by all of his billionaire ‘allies’ to gut government so completely that it can only be sustained by the lower and middle classes, and effectively relieve the rich from taxes. They can also be gutting the nation so that when election year comes around it’s so weak he can do whatever he wants and ignore the law. And if course, gut it completely so that the enemies of democracy wage all the wars they want so they can turn the status quo for themselves.
The US as it stands is nothing but an obstacle to these rich assholes.
It’s just compete idiocy though. The government is what grants them their property rights. They’re literally engineering their own demise.
Now they have to fill out form KF$34Get to buy anything and send it via fax. Peak efficiency!
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.
I hope the consequences follow right after he goes bankrupt (looking at the Tesla stock). So he’s not only in deep shit but also has no money to bribe him out.
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
“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,”
Yes. That’s why they did it.
I’m guessing that it was more costly to cancel those cards.
The knock on effects will probably be more costly than just canceling cards.
Everything he does will be more costly than if he just killed himself.
If he won’t do it, someone else should step in and do it for him.
I’m guessing it’d be technically illegal to cancel the cards but making them functionally useless is “a neat hack”.
I’d lean towards it being a case where routine expenses are presumed to be covered, and cancelling the card would just mean people payba different way. Setting a cap would change the definition of reasonable. I believe it also leaves existing already approved recurring transactions unchanged, since they probably don’t want to get sued for suddenly not paying bills.
The government doesn’t run their own CC infrastructure, but they issue their own cards so cancellation is basically free. It’s kinda weird to say, but the government is bigger than any bank, so it makes sense that they would do things that even small banks are capable of.
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 aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis
What the fuck un-American nonsense is this?
I do get it. We’ve normalized the “employer” to “employee” relationship, where you’re sort of a free person but also sort of a slave, and that’s carried over into government service. Fuck that though. You are a person. You’re allowed to talk if you want to, and any separate person who’s trying to tell you they are the one in charge of that decision is probably a big piece of dookie at heart.
You are a person. You’re allowed to talk if you want to, and any separate person who’s trying to tell you they are the one in charge of that decision is probably a big piece of dookie at heart.
I mean, they clearly were free to talk, because they did. The “not authorized to speak to the media” part is more along the lines of “not in a high enough position to give a carefully written (filtered through Public Relations, with whatever spin the government wants to put on it) statement”. There’s a big difference between a government employee speaking as an individual, and a government employee speaking on behalf of the government. The former is just a person expressing their concerns, but the latter is an official stance that the government has taken. They simply quoted the speaker as an individual, and made it clear that it’s not an official government statement.
Keeping their name out of it simply ensures there’s no potential blowback for the employee. Publicly speaking against your employer has historically gone poorly for the employees. But journalists want to ensure that people are still willing to come forward in the future. And putting an employee on blast for speaking against their employer would have a chilling effect on future interviewees. So the journalist protects the employee’s identity, while still quoting them as an individual.
it isn’t very efficient to hamstring a system which eliminates inefficiencies
Unless your goal is to create inefficiencies that pay you…
I wonder how that would even work here, though
Centralized payment vendor sold as better for accountability and efficiency. Owned by Musk.
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.
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!
