Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond.

Today on the show, credit card freezes and how Doge is using AI. I'm joined today by Wired's

director of business and industry, Zoe Schiffer.

Zoe, welcome to Uncanny Valley.

Thank you so much, Katie.

And we obviously know you well on this show because you co-host our Thursday episodes with Mike and Lauren.

Exactly. Yes, I'm switching sides this week.

And let's get right into it. So, Zoe, two weeks ago on February 20th, you published a story on Wired.com about a $1

spending limit being placed on government employee credit cards. Walk us through that first

story. You've subsequently published more reporting on that topic this week. But tell us

sort of where this came from at the outset.

Yeah. Okay. So like you said, on February 20th, employees at the General Services Administration

received this memo, kind of abruptly telling them that most of the credit cards used by

their office, as well as like every federal employee across the government,

we're going to have a $1 spending limit.

There's basically two types of credit cards that are used by most federal employees.

There's travel cards which are used for all sorts of work travel,

and then there's purchase cards which are used for like everything else.

So think like basic supplies,

trainings, software licenses, like all of that sort of thing. So this was almost immediately

going to have like a pretty severe impact on the ability for a lot of these people to do

their jobs. And what was the premise by which Doge mandated this credit card freeze?

...