President Trump issued his latest Executive Order (EO) Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Cost Efficiency Initiative on February 26, 2025. The stated purpose is to commence “a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public.”
Covered Contracts and Grants
Under the purview of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the DOGE Team Lead at each agency, agency heads will be responsible for:
- Creating a new technological system for recording every payment issued to each of the agency’s covered contracts and grants, its justification and approver for review;
- Subsequent to the new system implementation, justification will be submitted for approval prior to any future payment approval;
- Reviewing all existing covered contracts and grants (terminating or modifying where it can promote efficiency for the Administration) within 30 days;
- Conducting a comprehensive review of each agency’s contracting policies, procedures, and personnel;
- Issuing guidance on signing new contracts or modifying existing contracts to promote government efficiency and the policies of the Administration; and
- Each DOGE Team Lead shall provide the DOGE Administrator with a monthly informational report on contracting activities, including payment justifications.
In response to the EO’s language, “This process shall commence immediately and shall prioritize the review of funds disbursed under covered contracts and grants to educational institutions and foreign entities for waste, fraud, and abuse,” Todd Carolin, Senior Principal of IT Strategy and Innovation at Chenega Corporation, stated:
“It seems consistent with DOGE’s strategy to weed out grants to universities that deliver no value or which should not be underwritten. For example, grants to Chinese nationals conducting research under grants issued by NIH institutes. There’s been cases where such researchers have taken their knowledge back to China and then established biologics companies to compete against US companies — all paid for by U.S. taxpayers via grant funding. Additionally, the focus on international appears to mimic what they did at USAID.”
The Government Accountability Office noted that, in Fiscal Year 2023, the federal government committed about $759 billion on contracts, an increase of about $33 billion from FY22 after adjusting for inflation.
Federal Travel, Credit Cards and Property
In addition to the contracts and grants, each agency head also will institute changes regarding non-essential travel justification, government credit card usage, and real estate. This includes:
- Building a technological system within each agency that centrally records approval for federally funded travel for conferences and other non-essential purposes, where written justification will have to be submitted, reviewed and approved prior to non-essential, federally funded travel being approved.
- A 30-day freeze on credit card use (unless related to disaster relief, natural disaster response benefits or operations, or other critical services as determined by the Agency Head).
- Provide a complete and updated inventory of all real property and termination rights under existing leases to the General Services Administration (GSA), who will develop a plan of disposition for unnecessary owned or leased properties.
As of January 2025, GSA has 1,796 owned properties, and more than 7,500 separate leased properties.
According to the White House, the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit, the U.S. Digital Service, that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”
The pause on credit-card usage comes a week after DOGE disclosed there were around 90 million unique transactions made in FY24, running up about $40 billion in bills for the federal government, according to publicly available GSA data. The U.S. government currently has about 4.6 million active credit cards or credit card accounts on file – more than the total number of federal workers (about 3 million), not including government contractors and active-duty military personnel.
Unanswered Questions
With all of this information, questions remain:
- Who are the DOGE team leads?
- All that’s currently known is “Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney,” per EO 14219.
- Don’t many of these technology systems for recording payments already exist?
- While this order “excludes [funds for] direct assistance to individuals;expenditures related to immigration enforcement, law enforcement, the military, public safety, and the intelligence community; and other critical, acute, or emergency spending, as determined by the relevant Agency Head,” what does this mean for the discretionary funds of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)?
- DHS’s discretionary funds are allocated to support a variety of activities, including border security, disaster response, and personnel. With FY25 discretionary funds allocated as follows, which, if any, are not automatically excluded?
- $64.81 billion in total discretionary funding
- $4.7 billion for the Southwest Border Contingency Fund
- $22.7 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund
Funding