Across the federal government, Trump officials are halting a wide range of operations by declining to approve key funds. This unofficial hold on many activities has incapacitated many agencies’ divisions, even though they remain technically intact.

This account of how the administration and DOGE are stalling government operations is based on interviews with more than a dozen federal employees across eight agencies, as well as several internal emails and documents reviewed by The Washington Post. The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The effects are especially pronounced at the EPA, where staffers at 11 labs have struggled to continue researching an array of environmental threats, including air and water pollution as well as toxic “forever chemicals.” The labs are run by the Office of Research and Development, or ORD, which may be eliminated as part of a broader reorganization of the agency.

On paper, the division still exists. But in practice, the office’s research has been crippled by a new requirement that Trump officials approve all new lab purchases, according to three ORD employees.

Since the requirement took effect, officials in the EPA’s Office of Mission Support have not been signing many of the necessary forms certifying that the lab purchases comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, the employees said.

As a result, ORD is effectively “shutting down their laboratory activities,” a career EPA employee wrote in a Wednesday email to colleagues, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.

“We are unsure if these laboratory activities will continue post-reorganization,” the employee wrote. “Time and funding would be needed to reconstitute activities.”

Asked for comment, EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said in an email: “No ORD funding requests to OMS have been denied. At ORD and throughout the agency, EPA is continuing research and labs to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

The three ORD employees said that while no office funding requests have been denied, many requests have not been approved.

“We’ve sent multiple requests for new expenses to them, and they just sit on them,” one of the staffers said. “But they never officially cancel or deny anything. It’s like a pocket veto.”

At the Commerce Department, all contracts and grants costing $100,000 or more have been placed on hold pending the personal review of Lutnick, according to three agency employees and a memorandum obtained by The Post. The memo also specified that every contract or grant under $100,000 must be approved by either a “senior political appointee” or the commerce deputy chief of staff for policy, another political appointee.

Lutnick, who was confirmed in February, imposed the rule in mid-March. Since then, the employees said, work has sputtered across Commerce, a sprawling 50,000-person agency with 12 bureaus including the Patent Office, the International Trade Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Elements of the mandate affecting NOAA were previously reported by Axios.

A backlog of more than 3,000 requests has built up on Lutnick’s desk as of last week, the senior official said. Within NOAA, nearly 1,000 requests have been submitted for approval by a political appointee or the secretary, according to records obtained by The Post, with about 250 going to Lutnick. He has approved a little more than half of them, the records show. The NOAA contracts that are held up awaiting his notice total about $230 million, according to the documents.

“No matter where you look, there is a delay and a complication based on this ludicrous requirement that the secretary has implemented,” said Craig McLean, a former top NOAA research official who worked at the agency for more than four decades. He said the new policy could affect purchases of helium used for weather balloon launches and ships used for ocean mapping.

Delayed contracts also include those for janitorial, security and IT services. In some parts of the agency, that has led to a complete absence of front-office security guards and the temporary loss of internet or phone service — and has even meant some staff had to clean the bathrooms, the employee said.

A Commerce spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Elon Musk, who is preparing to step back from his work leading DOGE, recently told reporters at the White House that his team had remade the government in a way that would benefit Americans.

“In the grand scheme of things, I think we’ve been effective,” he said. “Not as effective as I’d like. I think we could be more effective. But we’ve made progress.”

However, Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said the Trump administration and DOGE appear to be “deliberately embedding red tape into government” by instituting “needless additional reviews of already-approved grants.”

“This makes sense if you assume that the purpose of DOGE is not to make government work better,” Moynihan said in an email, “but to stop government from working at all.”

The $1 spending limit on government-issued credit cards has also caused chaos at several other agencies since February, when DOGE began enforcing it. A Feb. 26 executive order imposing a “freeze” on these cards, with exceptions for “critical services,” cast the measure as an effort to ensure that “employees are accountable to the American public.”

Within parts of the Social Security Administration, the spending limit has for months left staffers unable to pay for phone bills, foreign-language interpreters and basic office supplies, according to several employees and records reviewed by The Post. That’s because less than a dozen people are responsible for approving most new purchases made by 1,300 offices.

One employee in an Indiana field office said that basic office supplies are running low, and managers have instructed staffers to ration paper and to avoid printing unless necessary. Some staffers have begun buying their own pens, but toner cartridges, at $200, are too expensive, the employee said.

In an email, a Social Security spokesperson said that the agency “is committed to operating with the highest level of financial control and efficiency.”

“We have a process in place to review all spending and eliminate wasteful or duplicative expenditures,” the spokesperson added. “It is critical that we protect taxpayer dollars so that we can effectively serve all those who depend on us.”

At the Defense Department, the spending limit initially prevented some employees from making the roughly 100 purchases of raw materials needed each week for ballistics testing on body armor and helmet impact experiments. After 30 days, the limit was lifted, said one Defense employee, but staff are still racing to make up for the delays.

Early on, the spending freeze also wreaked havoc at the National Park Service, where staffers could not buy the medicine needed to care for visitors or the horses ridden by some park rangers, said an employee there.

A second Park Service employee said routine expenses are still mired in bureaucratic delays, since a supervisor and division chief must now sign a form stating that the purchase is “mission critical.”

“The credit card situation has been a nightmare,” the employee said. “Things like web subscriptions, payments for routine services have become a huge hassle. An hour or two of staff time would now go into what would have been a quick internet purchase for something like buying a $10 box of Ziploc bags for collecting samples — highly efficient, isn’t it?”

Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the Park Service did not return requests for comment Friday.