Washington has discovered a government program that costs billions of dollars, and naturally, everyone is shocked.
The Government Accountability Office says federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025. Roughly $6.7 billion of that was tied to the Trump administration’s Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed workers who agreed to leave government to remain on salary while generally no longer working.
From the GAO:
OPM does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts, including the deferred resignation program. One of the administration’s stated principles for current workforce reduction efforts is to trim the budget topline by reducing full-time equivalent positions. To support these efforts, federal agencies used millions of workdays of paid administrative leave. To calculate long-term savings, OPM needs to know short-term costs of paid administrative leave used for these efforts. However, OPM cannot easily and accurately do this because the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts is reported with other types of general paid administrative leave. Without a mechanism to track paid administrative leave for workforce reduction efforts, federal leaders may not have the data needed to understand whether government-wide cost saving goals are being met.
You can understand why the headlines wrote themselves. Federal workers got paid billions not to work during a program associated with DOGE, which was created to cut waste and shrink government.
One national headline simply announced that the government paid workers $9.5 billion “not to work.” Another framed the program as DOGE causing the government to spend billions while supposedly saving money.
Hellbound and Down 