Government Watchdog Reveals Billions Paid to Inactive Federal Workers
Washington, Wednesday, 16 September 2026.
A new government report reveals $9.5 billion was spent paying federal employees not to work in 2025, largely driven by $6.7 billion in deferred resignation program costs.
The ‘Fork in the Road’ and the DOGE Strategy
The massive expenditure came as a direct result of the Trump administration’s aggressive push to downsize the federal workforce, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) [1][2]. Modeled after a corporate restructuring strategy used by Elon Musk during his acquisition of the social platform X, the initiative sought to rapidly reduce headcount by offering a “deferred resignation” program [3][4]. In January 2025, the administration extended this offer to approximately 2 million federal workers, presenting them with a “Fork in the Road” email that invited them to resign in exchange for full pay and benefits through September 30, 2025 [2][3].
Unprecedented Spikes in Paid Leave and Costs
According to a report released on September 15, 2026, by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), this deferred resignation program alone accounted for approximately $6.7 billion of the $9.5 billion total spent on paid administrative leave in 2025 [1][2]. The program allowed 139,963 to 144,312 departing federal employees to stop working while continuing to draw their salaries and benefits for the remainder of the fiscal year [1][3][5]. While the administration, represented by Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor, defended the upfront expense as a necessary step to secure $20 billion in annual recurring savings, critics and labor organizations like the American Federation of Government Employees raised immediate concerns over its legality and potential disruption to essential public services [3][7].
A Sixfold Surge in Paid Administrative Leave Costs
The implementation of this program triggered unprecedented spikes in the federal government’s paid leave metrics. The GAO’s analysis of payroll data from 76 federal agencies—covering roughly 95 percent of the civilian workforce—found that total salary costs associated with paid administrative leave increased sixfold between 2023 and 2025 [4][5]. Overall, the usage of paid administrative leave surged by 435 percent during the first two years of the Trump administration [1][5].
Workdays and Long-Term Leave Spikes
To put this rise into perspective, the total number of workdays of paid administrative leave across the federal government jumped from about 4 million in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024 to approximately 21.6 million workdays in 2025 [1][4]. Furthermore, the number of federal employees taking more than three months of paid leave exploded [4]. In 2023 and 2024 combined, only 600 federal workers took more than three months of paid leave; in 2025, that figure skyrocketed to nearly 100,000 employees [1][4].
Uneven Downsizing and Operational Repercussions
By January 2026, the Trump administration’s efforts had successfully shrunk the federal workforce by 12 percent, resulting in a reduction of roughly 216,000 workers over the course of 2025 [2][4]. However, the impact of these departures was highly uneven across different federal agencies [3]. According to GAO report GAO-26-108583, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) saw its workforce plunge by 95 percent, while the Department of Education was cut by 46 percent, the General Services Administration by 37 percent, the Office of Personnel Management by 34 percent, and the National Science Foundation by 33 percent [3]. In contrast, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) experienced a reduction of less than 1 percent [3].
Operational Friction and Rehiring Trends
This rapid downsizing has led to significant operational friction and subsequent rehiring. To fill critical gaps left by the sudden exodus, some departments have already begun reversing cuts, bringing back contractors and hiring workers to meet essential needs [2]. The Partnership for Public Service identified 20,557 new hires by June 2026 in roles that had been vacated under the deferred resignation program [3]. Furthermore, the administration’s broader downsizing plans have faced judicial setbacks; on September 1, 2026, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled that a DHS plan to slash Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staffing by 50 percent was unlawful [3].
Data Discrepancies and Unreliable Savings Claims
Beyond the immediate operational challenges, the GAO’s findings cast serious doubt on the official cost-saving narratives promoted by DOGE, which officially shut down in July 2026 after its primary functions were absorbed by the OPM in November 2025 [3]. While DOGE’s public website claimed $215 billion in savings, a separate GAO review of $110 billion of those claims concluded that the figures were “unreliable” [3]. The watchdog revealed that DOGE could not verify the methodology used to calculate 96 percent of its reported savings and had inappropriately taken credit for federal cost-saving initiatives that were already in progress prior to the department’s establishment [1][4].
Tracking Obstacles in Federal Human Resources
Furthermore, the GAO identified significant data quality issues within the OPM’s payroll systems. The watchdog noted that federal agencies had overstated paid administrative leave by 144 percent during pay periods containing public holidays between 2023 and early 2025 [5]. Because OPM currently lacks a dedicated category in its Enterprise Human Resources Integration payroll system to isolate workforce reduction leave from general administrative leave, tracking the true net savings of the downsizing initiative remains nearly impossible [5]. The GAO has issued recommendations to the OPM Director to create a new tracking category and publicly disclose these data limitations, but the OPM has stated it does not plan to retroactively correct the historical errors, leaving the true fiscal balance of the DOGE experiment highly contested [5].