The Trump administration's Elon Musk-inspired bid to slash the US federal workforce ended up costing taxpayers between $11.1bn and $15.1bn by March 2026, after Washington paid nearly 140,000 civil servants not to work under a controversial scheme called the Deferred Resignation Program, according to a new report by watchdog group Public Citizen.
For context, the programme was launched nationwide on 28 January 2025, shortly after Musk's newly created Department of Government Efficiency sent its now infamous 'fork in the road' email to hundreds of thousands of federal employees. That message offered staff a stark choice: resign from government service yet continue collecting their salaries until 30 September 2025, or stay on in a radically slimmed-down bureaucracy shaped by Musk's vision of a leaner state.
