ABSTRACT

A Government Accountability Office report issued Tuesday estimated the administration spent $6.7 billion on paid administrative leave for federal employees who took buyouts after Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk launched the deferred resignation program. The report found paid leave use across the government rose 435 percent in 2025 compared with 2023, and the GAO estimated 144,312 federal workers used the deferred resignation program.

The Hill

GAO report says administration spent $6.7 billion on paid leave after DOGE buyouts

Sep 19, 2026, 5:00 PM

Context

Employees who took the buyout were paid through the end of the fiscal year, according to the report, with some workers free from their duties for months while still receiving a paycheck as part of their deferred resignation.

The report found salary costs attributable to paid leave jumped sixfold between 2023 and 2025. Total workdays of paid administrative leave went from around 4 million before Trump took office to 21.6 million workdays in 2025. In 2023 and 2024, 600 federal workers across the whole of government took more than three months of paid leave, a number that rose to almost 100,000 in 2025.

The GAO found the administration spent $9.5 billion on paid leave and attributed $6.7 billion of that total to the buyouts.

An August report from the GAO found DOGE's "wall of receipts" took credit for cost-savings measures already in the works when it was created, and that "DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

All Perspectives

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.): "First of all, how stupid was it to pay people to stay home for four or five months — or longer — getting paid, and they don't have to do anything, and we've robbed the American people of the services they were providing," Beyer said. "There are ways to be more efficient. There are ways to shrink the headcount, and DOGE did it in the absolute stupidest way." Beyer, whose district of roughly 80,000 federal workers saw 20,000 lose their jobs early in the Trump administration, also said many of those who left had significant experience and institutional knowledge, and that replacing them means new hires who start from scratch.

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.): "I'm not surprised," Subramanyam said of the cost of firing people, adding that it makes more sense to keep employed the people who get rid of waste, fraud and abuse in government. He said the report was a "conservative estimate" and that a fuller cost-benefit analysis would have to account for losses to programs and expertise. "It's going to reverberate for a long time, as well as the talent that we are dissuading from joining the federal workforce for years to come," he said.

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor: The Trump administration has defended the cost of the buyouts, noting that paid leave costs are akin to salary costs it would have paid those workers anyway. Kupor noted that 270,000 federal workers have left government since the start of the Trump administration, through buyouts, layoffs or other methods, and wrote that the fully loaded cost of a federal employee is about $150,000 per year, so 270,000 employees represent more than $40 billion in annual costs. "So, for a one-time expense of at most $9.5 billion, taxpayers save more than $40 billion each year. That's a 400+% annual return, and the outlay paid for itself in under six months," Kupor wrote in a blog post.

Partnership for Public Service: The group estimates that 132,000 took the buyout, and that the buyouts, another 10,000 layoffs and a combination of early and regular retirements contributed to an unprecedented 319,000 government workers leaving in 2025 — double the yearly average. The group also found the government hired 20,557 people to backfill roles of those who took the buyout, noting that those new hires "tend to come with less experience."

Andrew Huddleston, American Federation of Government Employees: Huddleston, director of advocacy at the largest federal employee union, said the administration has not made the case that DOGE lived up to its name. "So you've got to net all that stuff out at the end to be able to prove any real savings over time, and it's unclear to me that they've done that, or that they plan to do that," he said. "It was extraordinarily expensive to the American people, and it's really unclear what it is that we got out of it."

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.): Ivey, whose Maryland district has many federal workers, said the cuts were made without precision or insight into what programs were being cut. Musk is "running around like a nut, waving a chainsaw around, and brought in all these people that didn't know what they were doing or anything about the agencies where they were making these cuts, or anything about the programs and policies that they were undermining and killing," he told The Hill. "It's probably one of the most egregious mismanagement enterprises I've seen in the government in my 50 years around this town."

Position not represented in the source reporting: Elon Musk.

Gaps & Unknowns

The source's opening paragraph states the administration spent $7 billion paying staff not to work, while the GAO figure cited in the report is $6.7 billion; the source does not reconcile the two figures.
The source does not state the calendar date the GAO report was issued, describing it only as issued Tuesday.
The source does not reconcile the GAO estimate that 144,312 federal workers used the deferred resignation program with the Partnership for Public Service estimate that 132,000 took the buyout.
The source does not state which fiscal year buyout participants were paid through, or how many of those who took the buyout were later rehired into federal service.
The source does not state whether the $9.5 billion paid leave figure covers only the buyout period or all federal paid leave in that period.
The source does not include a response from Elon Musk or DOGE to the criticism of the buyouts.

Sources & Further Reading

The Hill — original

Read the original at The Hill

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