Washington, D.C. — Federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025, a sixfold increase from 2023, according to a new Government Accountability Office report examining workforce-reduction efforts under the Trump administration.
GAO found that about $6.7 billion of the total was tied to the government’s Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed eligible federal workers to stop working while continuing to receive pay and benefits until their separation date, generally Sept. 30, 2025.
Nearly 140,000 federal employees ultimately participated in the program, according to Office of Personnel Management data. OPM’s original offer explicitly stated that workers accepting deferred resignation would retain full pay and benefits regardless of daily workload and would be exempt from in-person work requirements.
The GAO said paid administrative leave increased 435% between 2023 and 2025. However, it also cautioned that agency reporting problems may have overstated some totals because holidays were sometimes incorrectly recorded as administrative leave.
The watchdog recommended that OPM publicly disclose unresolved data-quality problems and create a separate reporting category for paid leave used in workforce reductions. OPM agreed with both recommendations.
Democrats have criticized the deferred resignation strategy as wasteful, while the administration has argued that reducing the federal workforce will generate longer-term savings. GAO said OPM currently lacks sufficiently precise data to determine the full short-term costs of those workforce reductions against any eventual savings.
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