Trump Admin Paid Federal Workers Nearly $10 Billion Not To Work In 2025

The federal government paid employees nearly $10 billion not to work last year under cuts led by President Donald Trump's infamous Department of Government Efficiency, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO found that $6.7 billion of that money was paid out under the Trump administration's "deferred resignation" programs, which encouraged workers to quit under the promise they would remain on the federal payroll for several months.

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All told, there was a sixfold increase in paid administrative leave under Trump's leadership last year compared to two years earlier, according to the analysis.

Democrats pointed at the data as evidence the Trump administration's attacks on the federal workforce ended up squandering money rather than saving it.

"After promising to cut waste, Trump instead set billions upon billions in taxpayer dollars on fire to quite literally pay people not to do jobs they loved — from researching cancer cures to taking care of our National Parks, and so much else," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement.

Trump came into office last year on a promise to slash agencies and reduce the size of the federal government. His newly formed DOGE, spearheaded by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, took an arbitrary and ham-fisted approach to trimming the workforce, pushing workers out by the thousands and often eliminating critical positions that needed to be refilled.

The deferred resignation program, which was run by the Office of Personnel Management and known colloquially as "Fork in the Road," offered workers the chance to give up their jobs while being paid through September 2025 to do little or no work. The administration used the threat of further layoffs in the future to push workers into accepting the proposal, which unions and Democratic lawmakers argued was unlawful.

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The GAO noted that paid administrative leave, which OPM directed agencies to use for the resignation program, doesn't come for free.

"It is a cost to taxpayers as employees receive full pay without performing job duties," the report states.

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Nearly 150,000 workers left the federal government between Trump's inauguration and August 2025, with the largest workforce cuts hitting the Treasury, Agriculture and Defense departments, according to an analysis from the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that advocates for effective government. The group said the administration's sloppy manner of pursuing cuts had led to "phenomenal waste."

According to GAO, nearly 100,000 federal workers took more than 90 days of paid administrative leave last year, compared to fewer than 600 workers in 2023 and 2024.

"Paid administrative leave usage peaked in July 2025 at nearly 3 million workdays; approximately 2.5 million of those workdays were associated with the deferred resignation program," the report noted.

It became evident quickly how the Trump administration's cuts hurt services at particular agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration and the National Weather Service. But it could be years before the full impact of the DOGE era comes into view, particularly as it relates to science and research.

Murray called the cuts "the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse."

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