The federal government spent an estimated $6.7 billion in 2025 paying employees to stay home under its deferred resignation buyouts, and the agency that ran the program cannot say exactly what it cost.
The Government Accountability Office found in a report released this week that federal agencies spent about $9.5 billion in salary costs on paid administrative leave in 2025, six times the 2023 level. Use of the leave rose 435% over the same period. GAO estimated about $6.7 billion of that, roughly 70%, went to the deferred resignation program.
OPM never created a separate category to track the leave, so it cannot isolate what the buyouts cost. To estimate it, the agency must match payroll records to separation records after employees separate from the federal government, a process GAO said will likely overstate the total.
Without that tracking, GAO found, OPM cannot confirm the cuts are producing real savings. GAO made two recommendations: that OPM disclose data reliability problems and build a tracking category for workforce-reduction leave. OPM agreed with both.
The leave was concentrated among a large group of workers. GAO found 98,758 employees took more than 90 workdays of paid administrative leave in 2025, compared with 567 in 2023 and 530 in 2024. GAO estimated 144,312 employees in the agencies it reviewed used the leave for the program.
OPM defended the buyouts as a clear savings for taxpayers.
“This is very simple. Every organization pays severance when reducing headcount. The federal government does the same. Having 270,000 fewer federal employees yields enormous savings to the American taxpayer,” Director Scott Kupor said in a statement to The Center Square.
In an August 2025 post, Kupor said the program gave employees eight months of paid leave and was expected to save more than $20 billion a year. OPM did not address GAO’s finding that it cannot separately track the cost.
GAO also found errors that likely inflate the public numbers. Some agencies coded federal holidays as paid administrative leave, and pay periods that included a holiday averaged 144% more leave than those without one. OPM does not plan to retroactively correct the historical data, which remains posted on its Federal Workforce Data website.
The report was requested by three members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: ranking member Gary Peters, D-Mich.; subcommittee Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla.; and subcommittee ranking member John Fetterman, D-Pa. Peters, Lankford and Fetterman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The deferred resignation program was a central part of the administration’s push to shrink the federal workforce, launched with the January 2025 “Fork in the Road” email offering employees pay through the end of the buyout period.
In June, OPM proposed a rule codifying deferred resignation as an acceptable use of administrative leave, noting the “temporary cost” could yield “large long-term savings.” The Center Square reported last month that a separate GAO review could not substantiate much of DOGE’s claimed savings.
GAO said the government cannot accurately determine whether its workforce-reduction savings goals are being met because the leave costs are not tracked. Without that, no one can say whether the cuts are paying off.