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.
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.
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