Agencies spent nearly $10 billion for feds not to work in 2025

The federal government spent nearly $10 billion placing more than 100,000 federal workers on paid administrative leave for extended periods last year, a sixfold increase from two years prior driven largely by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program aimed at encouraging feds to quit public service.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that around 70% of that money, or $6.7 billion went to feds who opted into the DRP, a program by which agencies paid employees to stay home, in exchange for their resignation by September 2025—or December of that year, for retirement-eligible workers. While federal employees took 4 million workdays worth of leave in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024, that number ballooned to 21.6 million workdays last year.

“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,” GAO wrote. “In 2023 and 2024, fewer than 600 federal employees took more than 90 workdays of paid administrative leave; in 2025, almost 100,000 employees took more than 90 days of paid administrative leave.”

The deferred resignation program came shortly after the Office of Personnel Management issued long-awaited regulations implementing the 2016 Administrative Leave Act, a law aimed at curbing the use of paid administrative leave.

OPM told agencies that those regulations would not take effect until September 2025, and later proposed a new rule codifying workforce realignment as a valid use of paid leave. OPM’s current guidance for agencies considering a deferred resignation program is to cap the period of paid administrative leave at 12 weeks.

GAO noted that its estimates regarding the costs of leave approved in connection with the deferred resignation program and other workforce restructuring efforts are likely a modest overcount. That’s because employees commonly misreport similar forms of paid time off, such as for a federal holiday or a doctor’s appointment, as well as the fact that OPM has not set up a dedicated leave category for leave connected to a workforce restructuring effort.

That means policymakers can’t know whether the Trump administration’s workforce reductions are actually reducing the cost of government, the report found. OPM Director Scott Kupor has previously said the DRP would save taxpayers $20 billion each year.

 “To calculate the long-term government-wide savings of workforce reduction efforts, OPM needs to know the short-term costs of using paid administrative leave,” GAO wrote. “[Without] an accurate understanding of how much paid administrative leave costs the federal government, there is no way to accurately determine to what extent the government-wide cost-savings goal is being met. OPM officials stated that they have no plans to create an additional subcategory of paid administrative leave associated with workforce reductions.”

GAO recommended the OPM acknowledge the data reliability issues inherent in its public-facing paid leave data, as well as create a new category in federal payroll systems to report workforce-reduction related paid leave. In its response, the dedicated HR agency reversed course and said it would begin the process of creating a new leave category to better track the usage of and reasoning for paid leave.

“OPM agrees that a dedicated administrative leave data element for workforce reduction efforts would enable more timely reporting on its use and simplify future analysis,” Kupor wrote. “OPM will begin the process of developing a new paid administrative leave category focused on workforce reduction efforts, in coordination with agencies and payroll service providers.”