The card is not a "perk". It's not there to make expenses that benefit you.

For travel expenses, it gives the company more control/monitoring and a tiny percentage benefit because they get the equivalent of cashback/points, not you (for you, the advantage is that you aren't required to front the company the money).

For non-travel expenses, it means you can spend company money on tools without wasting hours over $20 in shitty bureaucratic spending processes meant for much bigger purchases. If you need a specific adapter for work, and your manager approves that, you can buy it from Amazon or your local retailer, rather than filing a request to add a vendor to your purchasing system so this $20 item can hopefully be delivered in two months.

The alternatives are either you paying the $20 out of pocket because you don't want to deal with the hassle (i.e. essentially the business blackmailing you into donating money to them with the threat that your work would really suck otherwise), or you literally telling your boss, for months, that that urgent project is still waiting on that adapter, which is waiting on the approval that typically comes within 2-3 months.

Firstly, comparing government to private companies is already a a bad premise. The point of a private company is to make money. They make cuts to try and save money. Cutting credit cards is a sign that they want to reduce traveling and decrease efficiency by counting every penny. Instead of discounting microcharges as that and just bundling them up later on to handle at once.

With that said: someone claiming efficiency would not resort to penny pinching, especially with a budget in the trillions. It's not efficient in any metric

>just think I've been through private downsizing events and I don't really know why the public sector shouldn't occasionally have similar occurrences.

They do pcc. It's just a meticulous process becsuse government jobs are not at-will employment. But generally the country is growing so of course the government grows with it. That parts no different from the private sector.

Also keep in mind that this downsizing, outside of its legal dubiousness, is not in any way planned. It's not performance based and there's been no audits on what they are trying to reduce costs on. It's just a wrecking ball and Musk's tried and false method is to try to pick up the pieces afterwards. That's not how you want to treat people with access to a country's money, nuclear technology, taxes, and weapons.

If your bank wanted to downsize, how would you feel about them doing it by allowing a rogue team of 20-something software developers access to all its most sensitive IT systems?

> The real critique in my opinion is lack of professionalism but this gets somewhat subjective.

I think that's the point here, the overt pettiness from Musk/Trump. If they feel like employees shouldn't have company cards, then fine, just take them away! Surely it would be cheaper to cancel the cards than to keep track of all (now effectively useless) active cards?