Katie Drummond: And what was the premise by which DOGE mandated this credit card freeze? I mean, they are sort of ostensibly, in theory, according to their mandate, trying to reduce government waste, excess spending, fraud. Was it all of that? Was the thesis of this credit card freeze was that they would root out fraudulent spending?
Zoë Schiffer: That was the inference. They actually said, I think the word they used was that they were trying to simplify the credit card program. And then they hinted that there was a lot of wasteful spending on these cards. In fact, there was a study that was commissioned, I believe in 2002, that found that by bypassing the typical procurement process needed to get goods and services at the federal level, the federal government was actually saving $1.2 billion. Katie, does the term zero-based budgeting mean anything to you?
Katie Drummond: It means less to me, Zoë, than I think it does to you. So why don’t you walk us all through what that actually means.
Zoë Schiffer: OK. Yeah. There’s basically a punch list that I have at this point of all of the things that happened when Elon Musk bought Twitter, and I’m kind of going one by one and saying, “Oh, OK. Yeah, this is happening at the federal level. Oh, this is too.” So zero based budgeting is this idea that you take a budget, you slash it down to zero, and then you force the people under you to justify every single expense. At Twitter, what this looked like is that people were kept in a conference room on Saturdays for 12 hours at a time, and they were arguing directly to Elon Musk about why a critical security software was needed at the company. And if he didn’t agree with them, he would often fire them on the spot. At the federal level, what it means is that DOGE is trying to again slash the budget down to zero and then basically see who screams. The way that they talk about this is that often the biggest grifters are the one who scream first. And so you shut off all payments and then you see what’s breaking.
Katie Drummond: First of all, what a fascinating way to run not only a company, but the entire federal government. Second, the screaming has started. So since you published that story two weeks ago, that spending limit has rolled out across federal agencies across the government. And last night, Monday night, March 3rd, you and Emily Mullin, a reporter at WIRED, published another story about how this spending limit is essentially paralyzing federal agencies. And you have a ton of specific instances in here across federal agencies documenting what the impact of this spending freeze has been. Can you walk us through a little bit more about how this is disrupting the federal apparatus?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, for sure. There’s basically two big buckets that I’m putting the disruptions into. There’s kind of the chaos and confusion bucket, which is that employees all just receive this memo saying you’re not going to have access to money anymore. And it’s not clear whether or not if you put expenses on your personal card, you’ll ever get reimbursed. And so suddenly, people who work at the Federal Aviation Administration and have to travel to airports around the country to test out security and safety kind of software aren’t sure, like, wait, that’s literally my job, but am I allowed to make that trip? If I do, do I put it on my personal credit card? So it’s just stalling work that was previously done with a lot of ease. And then there’s the real tangible impacts, which are a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who tests new vaccines and treatments in rodents, says he’s had to put experiments on hold because his lab isn’t able to get antibodies, which are critical to do this sort of research.
