On Wednesday, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Cost Efficiency Initiative.” It’s a real decisive answer; it’s lengthy, covers a lot of ground, and best of all, makes the DOGE official. Oh, there will still be challenges, and the left will still try to throw anything they can to gum up the works and keep the federal gravy train rolling, but this is still, as someone once said, a “big effin’ deal.”
Here are a few of the more interesting bits of this rather major EO:
Non-Essential Travel Justification. Each Agency Head shall, with assistance from the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, build a technological system within each agency that centrally records approval for federally funded travel for conferences and other non-essential purposes. Once an agency’s system is in place, the Agency Head shall prohibit agency employees from engaging in federally funded travel for conferences or other non-essential purposes unless the travel-approving official has submitted a brief, written justification for the federally funded travel within such system.
Question: The nation is seeing trillion-dollar budget deficits, and has $36 trillion in debt. Why is any non-essential travel at the taxpayers’ expense being conducted, at all? Slam the door. Let them attend conferences using Zoom. Meetings dealing with classified material we can concede are essential, but many of these things aren’t essential and don’t need to be attended in person. Cut them off.
Credit Card Freeze. 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.