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Federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion in salary costs on paid administrative leave in 2025, a sixfold increase from 2023, as the Trump administration pursued a sweeping effort to reduce the size of the federal government.
The Government Accountability Office said Wednesday that use of paid administrative leave increased 435% from 2023 to 2025, with about $6.7 billion of the 2025 total associated with the administration’s Deferred Resignation Program. The program allowed eligible employees to stop working while continuing to receive pay and benefits until their scheduled separation.
The workforce reductions were part of a broader administration initiative that included the U.S. DOGE Service, or Department of Government Efficiency, a hiring freeze, early-retirement incentives, reductions in force and other restructuring efforts. Federal agencies were directed to work with DOGE as part of efforts to reduce spending and reshape the federal workforce.
DOGE and the Federal Workforce
The administration has described the workforce reductions as an effort to eliminate unnecessary positions and reduce government spending. OPM says the Deferred Resignation Program resulted in about 154,000 voluntary resignations, while its current workforce data shows a decline of more than 271,000 federal employees since Jan. 20, 2025.
GAO previously found that nearly 378,000 employees separated from 22 major federal agencies during 2025, with roughly 65% of those departures occurring in the second half of the year as employees who had accepted deferred resignation offers left government.
The Cost of Paying Employees to Leave
The Deferred Resignation Program generally allowed participating employees to remain on paid administrative leave until their separation date. GAO estimated that the program accounted for $6.7 billion of the $9.5 billion in 2025 administrative-leave salary costs.
GAO said, however, that the figures come with important limitations. Agencies incorrectly reported substantially more administrative leave during pay periods containing federal holidays, and the watchdog said those reporting problems could overstate the actual amount of leave and associated costs.
The report also found that OPM cannot accurately isolate the cost of administrative leave used specifically for workforce-reduction efforts because it is recorded alongside other forms of administrative leave.
That makes it difficult to determine the program’s ultimate savings, GAO said.
GAO Calls for Better Tracking
GAO recommended that OPM publicly disclose remaining data-reliability problems and create a separate payroll category for administrative leave tied to workforce reductions. OPM agreed with both recommendations.
The report does not conclude that the workforce-reduction strategy failed to produce savings. Instead, GAO said the government lacks sufficiently precise data to determine the short-term cost of paid leave used for workforce reductions and to evaluate those costs against longer-term savings.
The findings add a new measure of the financial scale of the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal workforce, including initiatives carried out with DOGE and the Deferred Resignation Program.
