OUTRAGE: Taxpayers Funded $9.5B For No Work

Hands holding and counting stacks of cash — TAXPAYING MONEY SHOCKER

The federal government spent $9.5 billion in 2025 paying employees to stay home instead of work.

Quick Take

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found agencies spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025.
Of that total, $6.7 billion went to workers in the Deferred Resignation Program, who kept their pay while not working.
The federal workforce shrank by roughly 216,000 to 256,000 employees across major agencies, depending on the measure used.
Administrative leave spending jumped 435% compared to two years earlier, according to the watchdog’s findings.

What The Watchdog Report Actually Found

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s independent watchdog, published its findings on federal workforce changes on September 15. The report said agencies paid $9.5 billion in 2025 to keep employees on administrative leave.

Most of that money, $6.7 billion, tied directly to workers who accepted President Trump’s deferred resignation offer but had not yet formally left government service.

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 Deferred Resignation Program let federal workers agree to resign or retire by September 30, 2025. In exchange, they stayed on paid administrative leave, collecting their full salary and benefits, until their exit date arrived. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) built the plan to shrink government fast without forcing layoffs.

A Sixfold Jump In Paid Leave

Federal News Network reported the deal produced a sixfold increase in administrative leave use compared to prior years. GAO pegged the year-over-year jump in leave spending at 435% higher than two years before the program launched.

Nearly 144,000 employees accepted the deferred resignation offer in just the first half of 2025, and most of them stayed on the payroll for months afterward without working.

That surge in paid leave came alongside a real shrinking of the federal payroll. GAO found overall staffing at major agencies fell by more than 255,000 employees, an 11.3% drop, largely driven by retirements, resignations, and the deferred resignation push. Those three categories together made up nearly 80% of all separations tracked during the year.

How This Fits A Pattern Of Government Downsizing

Paying workers to leave government is not a new idea. GAO has documented buyout programs stretching back to the 1990s, when agencies offered up to $25,000 to employees willing to walk away voluntarily.

Those earlier efforts shrank the federal workforce by more than 230,000 people between 1993 and 1996, though GAO also warned that fast cuts sometimes left agencies short-staffed and stretched thin.

The 2025 version worked differently. Instead of a lump-sum payment, workers kept drawing regular paychecks and benefits while doing no work, sometimes for up to eight months.

Supporters of the approach argue it avoided the legal and morale problems of mass layoffs by making the exit voluntary. Critics see a simpler math problem: taxpayers footed a $9.5 billion bill for labor that produced nothing in return.

Both readings rest on the same numbers. The Trump administration built the Deferred Resignation Program as part of a broader push, tied to the Department of Government Efficiency, to cut federal bureaucracy and reduce long-term payroll costs. GAO’s report gives the first full government-wide accounting of what that trade-off actually cost in year one.

What Comes Next For Federal Payroll Costs

OPM has said around 317,000 federal workers left government service in 2025, though separation counts vary by agency and by which departures analysts include.

GAO cautioned in its report that OPM itself does not know the precise total cost of paid administrative leave tied to workforce reduction, since agencies track the expense differently.

Congress will now decide whether the upfront cost of paid leave was worth the long-term savings from a smaller federal payroll.

Fewer workers on the books should lower salary spending in future years, but the $9.5 billion price tag for 2025 shows that shrinking government fast rarely comes free. The real test will be whether next year’s numbers show the savings catching up to the bill.