Taxpayers covered an estimated $9.5 billion in salaries for federal employees on paid administrative leave in 2025, most of it tied to a program that paid people to quit.
Story Highlights
- $9.5 billion in paid administrative leave in 2025, a sixfold jump from 2023.
- About $6.7 billion linked to the Deferred Resignation Program encouraging exits.
- Leave days surged to about 21.6 million in 2025 from roughly 4–4.4 million prior.
- Office of Personnel Management says costs were a one-time trade for future savings.
What The Watchdog Found And Why It Mattered
The Government Accountability Office reported that federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025, a sixfold increase over 2023. Coverage tied the surge to the Trump administration’s workforce reduction drive and the Department of Government Efficiency’s push to shrink government headcount. Around $6.7 billion of the total connected to the Deferred Resignation Program, which offered employees a path to resign later while remaining off the job until their set exit date. Agencies recorded a flood of leave days as a result.
The number of paid leave workdays exploded. Reports summarizing the Government Accountability Office’s findings said agencies logged about 21.6 million workdays of paid administrative leave in 2025, up from about 4 million in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024. That jump tracked with buyout and separation offers designed to downsize quickly without mass firings. One broadcast summary cited about 144,000 employees accepting buyouts under the same campaign, a figure that helps explain the volume of people in leave status while they waited to separate.
How The Deferred Resignation Program Drove Costs
The Office of Personnel Management issued guidance in early 2025 that allowed employees who chose deferred resignation to step out of return-to-office rules and, upon acceptance, be placed on paid administrative leave until their effective resignation date, often set for the fiscal year end. That mechanism created a pipeline of employees who were still on the payroll but not working. Media summaries of the Government Accountability Office report say about seventy percent of the 2025 paid administrative leave dollars tied back to that program.
Supporters of the strategy argued the spike was the price of speed. The Office of Personnel Management’s director, Scott Kupper, defended the expense as a one-time cost meant to right-size government and save money every year going forward. He cited projected annual taxpayer savings of $40 billion from a leaner federal workforce, outpacing the temporary leave bill by a wide margin. From a conservative, common-sense lens, that claim aligns with the idea that upfront restructuring costs can pay off if the headcount reduction sticks and agencies do not backfill the same positions later.
The Estimate Caveat And The Accountability Gap
The $9.5 billion number is an estimate by the Government Accountability Office, not a line-by-line accounting. Reporting on the watchdog’s findings notes that the Office of Personnel Management did not have precise, consolidated costs for paid administrative leave related to workforce reduction efforts. That lack of internal tracking complicated the picture, even as the scale of the leave spike remained clear. The lesson is simple: if government does not count a cost tightly, someone else will, and taxpayers will ask why the agencies could not do it first.
Administrative leave sits inside payroll codes that vary across agencies, which makes it easy to misclassify or lose detail without strong rules and oversight. The 2025 experience shows how a legal and common tool can scale fast when policy creates incentives to use it. The Office of Personnel Management’s own materials laid out how deferred resignations would work, including leave use and effective dates, so the resulting surge followed directly from program design, not random drift.
What Comes Next For Agencies And Taxpayers
Agencies now face two linked tests: make the projected savings real and prove they can track this category with discipline. If the administration’s promised annual savings arrive, the 2025 bill looks like an investment. If agencies rebuild headcount or keep loose leave controls, the cost looks like waste. The Government Accountability Office’s headline numbers and the Office of Personnel Management’s defense set a clear scoreboard. Results in the 2026 and 2027 payroll and staffing levels will settle the debate.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently published a report detailing how the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the government led to $9.5 billion being spent on salary costs for administrative leave in 2025. This is six times the amount spent on… pic.twitter.com/xTXDAb4A1L
— Straight Arrow (@StraightArrow__) September 18, 2026
Congress should demand agency-by-agency leave and payroll ledgers that tie paid administrative leave to specific programs and dates. Taxpayers deserve straight math: how many employees entered the program, how long they stayed on leave, and what jobs disappeared for good. The core conservative test applies here: spend once, save every year. The federal government has shown the bill. Now it has to show the savings, with clean books and fewer funded seats.
Sources:
reason.com, cbsnews.com, theguardian.com, politico.com, govexec.com, livemint.com
