Taxpayer Cash Burned: $9.5B For No Work

Hands holding stack of one hundred dollar bills — TAXPAYING MONEY SHOCKER

Washington spent $9.5 billion last year keeping federal workers on the payroll while they did no work at all.

Quick Take

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report says agencies spent $9.5 billion on paid leave for federal workers in 2025.
Most of that money, $6.7 billion, went to employees who accepted the deferred resignation program.
The federal workforce shrank by roughly 216,000 to 256,000 workers depending on the count, an 11.3 percent drop.
Paid administrative leave use jumped 435 percent compared to two years earlier.

What The Watchdog Report Actually Found

The Government Accountability Office published its findings Tuesday, putting a hard number on something everyone suspected was expensive. Federal agencies paid workers $9.5 billion in 2025 while those employees were not doing their jobs.

The bulk of that spending, $6.7 billion, tied directly to the deferred resignation program President Trump’s administration rolled out early in the year.

That program let federal employees agree to resign or retire by September 30, 2025, while staying on the payroll and keeping their salary and benefits in the meantime.

The Office of Personnel Management created the offer as a way to shrink government without mass layoffs. Nearly 144,000 employees signed up in just the first half of the year, and most stayed on paid status until fall or winter.

The federal government paid federal workers $9.5 billion not to work in 2025 amid President Trump's push to shrink the federal workforce, according to a new watchdog report. https://t.co/kzhI8kB8gA

— ABC News (@ABC) September 16, 2026

The math behind the $6.7 billion figure comes straight from the deferred resignation program’s design. Workers who took the deal did not have to show up or produce work.

They simply waited out their leave period collecting a paycheck, a structure the program’s own paperwork spelled out from the start.

A Shrinking Workforce, But At What Price

The federal civilian workforce dropped by close to 256,000 employees in 2025, an 11.3 percent decline across nearly every major agency.

That marks the first full accounting of how deep the Trump administration’s downsizing effort actually cut. Retirements, resignations, and the deferred resignation program together explain almost 80 percent of all the people who left.

Looking closer at the numbers, agencies reported more than 134,000 separations against just under 66,000 new hires in the first half of 2025 alone, leaving staffing gaps at nearly every major department.

By year’s end, total separations climbed toward 786,000 across the departments tracked, offset by about 127,000 hires brought in to fill critical gaps.

Paid administrative leave itself is not new. GAO has flagged its use for over a decade, once finding it accounted for less than 1 percent of total federal paid work days in earlier years. What changed in 2025 was scale.

Leave use tied to the workforce reduction effort spiked 435 percent compared to just two years before, according to the same watchdog analysis.

Why The Price Tag Sparked Fresh Scrutiny

Federal News Network reported the sixfold jump in administrative leave usage as the clearest sign the deferred resignation program carried real, unavoidable costs even as it trimmed headcount.

An outside tracker separately estimated the government paid $4.5 billion to workers on leave under the program specifically through September, with additional administrative leave costs piling on afterward.

GAO’s own caveat matters here. The watchdog noted that the Office of Personnel Management does not actually know the full, precise cost of paid administrative leave tied to the workforce reduction push, meaning the final bill could shift as more data comes in. That is a normal accounting limitation, not a dispute over what happened.

History shows buyout-style programs are a recurring tool for shrinking government, and GAO has long warned that downsizing without tight planning can leave agencies short-staffed and thin on institutional knowledge.

The 2025 numbers fit that same pattern: a leaner federal workforce, a real price tag for getting there, and a watchdog now putting exact figures on both sides of the ledger. Taxpayers deserve that kind of transparency, and this report delivers it plainly.

Whether $9.5 billion counts as a fair transition cost or an expensive shortcut depends on what happens next.

If the leaner agencies function well and the savings from fewer permanent salaries outpace the leave payouts over time, the number becomes a footnote. If service backlogs grow instead, the price tag will look a lot harder to defend.