GAO: Federal Government Paid $9.5 Billion in Administrative Leave in 2025, Mostly Tied to Trump's Buyout Program

The number: $9.5 billion for people not working

The federal government spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025, according to a Government Accountability Office report published Wednesday, September 16. That's nearly a threefold jump in cost from the $3.2 billion spent combined in 2023 and 2024.

The GAO measured this in workdays, not just dollars. Paid leave days rose from about 4 million in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024 to 21.6 million in 2025, a 435% increase. The watchdog pulled payroll data from 76 agencies covering roughly 95% of the civilian federal workforce.

Most of that spike traces to one program: the Deferred Resignation Program, the buyout OPM rolled out in January 2025 as part of the administration's push under the Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the federal workforce. Employees who took the deal got to stop working but kept full pay and benefits through September 30, 2025. GAO says $6.7 billion, about 70% of the 2025 total, came from that program.

How many people took the deal

The administration projected 200,000 federal employees would accept the buyout. GAO's leave data shows 144,312 did. Separate federal workforce data cited by TIME puts the deferred-resignation departures at 139,963, a modest discrepancy that reflects how agencies tracked the program differently rather than any dispute over the broad numbers.

Either way, the administration fell well short of its 200,000 target. Paid leave under the program peaked in July 2025, when 2.5 million of the month's 3 million total leave workdays were tied to the buyout, per the GAO.

OPM's defense

OPM Director Scott Kupor pushed back hard on the framing of the report. He said the $9.5 billion figure ignores that it's a one-time cost tied to cutting 270,000 federal positions, which he says saves taxpayers $40 billion a year going forward.

"That 400% return on investment is a massive benefit to the taxpayer," Kupor said in a statement responding to the report.

If the workforce reduction is permanent and the $40 billion annual savings estimate holds up, a $9.5 billion upfront cost is a reasonable trade financially. The problem, according to GAO itself, is that nobody can currently verify whether that $40 billion figure is accurate.

What GAO says it couldn't verify

The report states plainly that OPM "does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts," because agencies lumped buyout-related leave in with general administrative leave numbers rather than tracking it separately. GAO also says it could not determine whether the long-term savings goals behind the leave program were actually achieved.

This is a real gap. Kupor's 400% ROI claim, however plausible, isn't something GAO can currently confirm or deny with the data agencies provided.

This isn't the first credibility problem for DOGE's savings math. DOGE's own "Wall of Receipts" claimed $215 billion in federal savings from cut contracts, leases and grants. A separate GAO report released in August found about $110 billion of that figure was inflated, and that DOGE couldn't provide sufficient information to verify how it calculated 96% of its reported savings.

The workforce math and the rehiring problem

Federal data shows a net decline of 271,363 civilian employees, about 12% of the federal workforce, between Trump's inauguration and July 2026. Cuts weren't even: USAID's staff fell 95%, per a separate GAO analysis, while the Education Department dropped 46%, GSA 37%, OPM 34%, and the National Science Foundation 33%. The Department of Homeland Security cut less than 1%.

Some of those cuts didn't stick. The Partnership for Public Service identified 20,557 hires by June 2026 into the same types of roles vacated by deferred-resignation departures, meaning agencies had to rehire for jobs they'd just paid people to leave.

Douglas Pasternak, research director at Public Citizen's Trump Accountability Project, told the Guardian the rollout was "haphazard" and pointed to delays in Social Security check deliveries, longer VA wait times, and cuts to federal firefighters and cybersecurity staff at CISA that later required rehiring. Those are Pasternak's characterizations of downstream effects, not independently verified GAO findings in this report, and the White House has not conceded that any of those problems stemmed from the buyout program specifically.

What's still unresolved

GAO has now flagged two straight credibility gaps in DOGE-era savings claims: the $110 billion in unverifiable contract-cut savings, and now an inability to confirm whether the $9.5 billion in leave costs actually bought the $40 billion in annual savings OPM claims. Congress has the GAO's recommendation that agencies build a mechanism to actually track these costs going forward. Whether OPM adopts that tracking, and whether the promised $40 billion in yearly savings shows up in next year's budget numbers, remains the open question nobody can answer yet.