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Federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion keeping employees on paid administrative leave in 2025, a 435% jump from 2023, according to a new Government Accountability Office review of federal payroll records.
- About $6.7 billion of that total covered roughly 144,000 workers who accepted a buyout known as the Deferred Resignation Program, staying on the payroll for months without reporting to work.
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The Office of Personnel Management says the one-time expense will generate $40 billion a year in savings, but auditors say they cannot verify that claim, and outside payroll data show the workforce shrank by far less than the administration is citing.
A Sixfold Jump in Paid Leave, By the Numbers
Government auditors have now confirmed what federal employee unions and budget watchdogs have suspected for months: the campaign to downsize the civil service came with an enormous, largely hidden price tag. Paid-leave workdays rose from about 4 million in calendar year 2023 to 4.4 million the following year, then rocketed to roughly 21.6 million in 2025 — a 435% increase in just two years that pushed salary costs alone to $9.5 billion, the GAO found.
Nearly 100,000 employees stayed on leave for more than 90 days last year. In 2023 and 2024 combined, fewer than 600 employees crossed that threshold — a sign of just how unusual this stretch became for the federal workforce.
Where the Money Went: The Deferred Resignation Buyout
Most of the spike traces to a single initiative: the Deferred Resignation Program, or DRP, which the Office of Personnel Management rolled out at the start of President Trump's second term. In late January 2025, nearly 2 million federal workers received an email — quickly nicknamed the "Fork in the Road" offer — inviting them to resign in exchange for continued pay and benefits through the end of the fiscal year on September 30. Anyone who wanted in had to lock in the decision by February 12, 2025.
The administration originally projected roughly 200,000 employees would sign up. The final count, according to CBS News's review of the GAO data, landed closer to 144,000 — still enough to generate $6.7 billion in leave-related salary costs, about 70% of the government's total paid-leave bill for the year. The buyout-related leave hit its high point in July 2025, when roughly 2.5 million of that month's nearly 3 million total paid-leave workdays were tied to the program.
Two Sets of Math: $40 Billion in Claimed Savings, Zero Independent Confirmation
OPM Director Scott Kupor has defended the price tag as money well spent. Responding to the audit, he argued it ignored the gap between the $9.5 billion upfront cost and roughly $40 billion in projected annual savings tied to cutting 270,000 positions from the federal payroll. "That 400% return on investment is a massive benefit to the taxpayer," Kupor said. That savings estimate has grown since the program launched: back in August 2025, Kupor put the annual savings closer to $20 billion.
Outside figures complicate that story. Federal payroll data reviewed by ABC News put the actual 2025 decline in the federal workforce at roughly 216,000 positions — well short of the 270,000 the administration cites as the basis for its savings claim.
GAO itself won't referee the dispute. Auditors found that OPM has no separate payroll code isolating leave tied to workforce cuts, and that agencies have sometimes logged holidays and routine time off the same way they log buyout-related leave — a mixing of categories that, as Government Executive reported, leaves both the true cost and the true savings impossible to pin down for now.
Democrats Call the Program Wasteful; Agencies Feel the Strain
The political reaction split along familiar lines. Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray called the program "the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse," arguing the administration paid billions to push out staff who, in her telling, were doing work the country needed.
Critics have pointed to slower processing at the IRS, the Social Security Administration and the National Weather Service as early evidence of the strain, a pattern HuffPost's coverage of the report also noted. Separately, an August analysis from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service found that agencies had already rehired more than 20,500 people into the same job categories vacated by DRP departures, often at more junior pay grades than the employees who left.
What Happens Next
GAO's central recommendation was procedural but pointed: give workforce-reduction leave its own tracking code so the government can actually measure what it's spending. OPM initially told auditors it had no plans to do so, then reversed course in its official written response, promising to design a new leave-tracking category alongside federal agencies and their payroll-services vendors.
Until that system exists, the question hanging over the entire buyout — whether $9.5 billion bought a leaner, cheaper government or just an expensive way to say goodbye — will have to wait for next year's audit to settle.
