The Trump administration spent an estimated $9.5 billion last year on paid administrative leave for federal workers as it pushed to cut costs by shrinking the government, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday.
Agencies’ use of paid administrative leave jumped by 435% from 2023 to 2025, the report found, and salary costs from such leave rose sixfold. That coincides with President Donald Trump’s decision in 2025 to create the Department of Government Efficiency led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, which enacted mass firings and dissolved the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Much of the increased leave cost — about $6.7 billion — came from salary paid through a DOGE-era “deferred resignation program,” GAO found. Nearly 140,000 federal employees opted into the program, according to the Office of Personnel Management. It allowed for federal workers who agreed to quit in early 2025 to still be paid through September.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
The GAO report emphasized that its numbers were estimates, noting that OPM “does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts, including the deferred resignation program.”
“To calculate long-term savings, OPM needs to know short-term costs of paid administrative leave used for these efforts,” the report explained. “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.”
The deferred resignation program was unveiled just days into Trump’s second term, and federal workers received a “Fork in the Road” email laying out their options. Musk, who had quickly risen to the highest echelons of power in the administration, had previously sent an email with the same subject line to X employees, where he reshaped the company’s workforce.
At the time of the program’s announcement, then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that if federal workers “don’t want to work in the office and contribute to making America great again, then they are free to choose a different line of work, and the Trump Administration will provide a very generous payout of 8 months.”
During Trump’s second term, the federal workforce has lost more than 271,000 employees as of July, according to data published by OPM. The figure includes voluntary and involuntary departures. The data indicates that from 2015, the earliest year provided, to 2025, when Trump took office again, the federal workforce grew every year.
