On September 15, 2026, the Government Accountability Office reported that federal agencies paid about $9.5 billion in salaries to employees on paid administrative leave in calendar year 2025, a sixfold increase from 2023. More than $6.7 billion of that, about 70 percent, went to employees in the deferred resignation program, which the Office of Personnel Management offered to federal employees beginning with its “Fork in the Road” email on January 28, 2025. The report was requested by Sens. Gary Peters (D-MI), James Lankford (R-OK) and John Fetterman (D-PA).
GAO counted about 144,312 employees who took administrative leave under the deferred resignation program. Use of administrative leave rose 435 percent: agencies reported roughly 21.6 million workdays in 2025, compared with about 4.0 million in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024. In 2025, 98,758 employees were on administrative leave for more than 90 workdays, compared with 567 in 2023.
GAO flagged the limits of the data. Its figures cover gross salary only, not benefits, and several agencies, including the Education Department, NASA and the Social Security Administration, did not provide data. GAO said reported leave “could overstate the actual amount used,” and that “Because these hours cannot be differentiated once they are reported to OPM, the actual total of administrative leave hours used for only workforce reduction efforts is unknown.” It recommended that OPM disclose those data limitations and track leave used for workforce reductions as its own category; OPM agreed with both recommendations.
OPM argued the spending bought lasting savings. OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote to GAO, “This distinction is crucial: The savings recur every year, while the administrative leave costs with the DRP were incurred once.” The report notes that OPM expects the program to save more than $20 billion a year, while OPM told CNN the report “fails to highlight the difference between a one-time expense ($9.5 billion) to reduce the size of the federal government by 270,000 employees and the $40 billion per year savings in taxpayer dollars that this reduction provides.” GAO did not evaluate those savings claims. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) said, “This was the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse.”
The official figure replaces earlier outside estimates of the program's cost, including the Partnership for Public Service's roughly $4.5 billion (see An Analysis Finds Trump's Federal Workforce Purge Cost the Economy More Than $165.6 Billion. The Partnership for Public Service Calls It 'The Cost of Chaos.').
Update (September 24, 2026): a separate analysis fills in what happened to the jobs. The Partnership for Public Service found that by June 2026, 20,557 employees had been hired into the same agency subcomponents and occupational series that people had left under the deferred resignation program. Between February and August 2025, 8,642 of those hires were made “before experienced employees had even left.” About 63 percent of the new hires had never worked in the federal government, and on the General Schedule they came in an average of about 1.4 grades below the people who departed. At the Internal Revenue Service, which lost 4,566 customer service representatives to the program, average hold times rose 75 percent against the 2025 filing season, and the busiest line went from an average 26-minute wait to 45 minutes.
That is the part the savings argument has to answer: the government paid people to stop working, then rehired at lower grades and less experience into the same roles, in thousands of cases before the departures had happened.