The Doge Team Makes Its Case: Inside the Push to Cut Federal Waste

The federal government has roughly 4.6 million credit cards for about 2.4 million employees. That is not a typo. It was one of the smaller discoveries made by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) team during what they describe as an ongoing effort to reduce federal spending by 15 percent — a target they consider "quite achievable" given what they have already found. The team, assembled under the Trump administration and led by Elon Musk, includes former tech executives, engineers, and a former oil company CEO, all of whom describe a government whose financial systems are so fragmented that basic oversight has become nearly impossible.

The Scale of the Problem

The Doge team's central argument is that the federal government is not merely inefficient but structurally incapable of accounting for its own spending. Steve Davis, a former SpaceX engineer now serving as Doge's chief operating officer, said the team routinely encounters waste of "a billion dollars or more casually." The example they kept returning to: an $830 million online survey for the Department of Interior — ten questions about national parks, conducted with no apparent plan for using the results. "The survey just governs nothing," one team member said.