Sunita Somvanshi
The federal government paid $9.5 billion in salary costs for workers on administrative leave in 2025. That is six times the 2023 level, according to a Government Accountability Office report released September 15. The GAO analyzed data from 76 agencies covering roughly 95% of the federal civilian workforce — making this a near-complete accounting of what agencies actually paid, not an extrapolation.
The $9.5 billion covered 144,312 employees who received salary while on paid administrative leave, accounting for an estimated 21.6 million workdays. That works out to roughly $440 per workday. The increase from 2023 to 2025 was 435% — a figure the GAO attributes primarily to the federal government’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), which the report links to approximately $6.7 billion of the total.
The GAO covered the period following the Office of Personnel Management‘s instruction to agencies to place workers on paid administrative leave as part of the DRP rollout. Employees were offered full pay and benefits through September 2025 in exchange for agreeing to resign. Of the roughly 2 million federal civilian workers offered the program, approximately 139,963 departed through it. The net federal workforce declined by 271,000 since the program began.
The $9.5 billion figure appears in nearly every news report about this study. What appears in fewer of them is the GAO’s own caveat: the data may be overstated. Agencies reporting administrative leave during pay periods that include federal holidays inflated their figures by 144%, the GAO found. The Office of Personnel Management, which compiles this data, does not retrospectively correct historical errors. As of the report’s publication, OPM acknowledged it does not know the actual cost of the administrative leave program with precision.
What the Data Can and Cannot Tell You
The GAO report does not conclude that $9.5 billion was wasted. What it says is that $9.5 billion in salary costs were incurred while workers were on paid administrative leave — workers who were on payroll, entitled to their pay, under a program that OPM administered and agencies implemented on direction. OPM’s stated defense is that the one-time $6.7 billion DRP cost should be weighed against what it projects as $20 billion in recurring annual savings from the reduced headcount.
Whether that math holds depends on what happened next. The GAO also found that 20,557 federal workers who departed through the program had been rehired in similar roles by June 2026 — adding another layer of cost the $20 billion savings estimate does not fully account for.
Agency-level impacts were uneven. USAID lost 95% of its workforce. The Department of Education saw a 46% reduction. The General Services Administration fell by 37%. Senate critics have called the outcome “the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse.” OPM Director Kupor has defended the program as a one-time restructuring cost.
What was the Deferred Resignation Program? Announced in early 2025, it offered federal workers full pay and benefits through September 2025 in exchange for agreeing to leave their positions. Roughly 140,000 workers accepted. The GAO estimates the salary costs for this group at $6.7 billion of the $9.5 billion total.
The GAO has directed OPM to improve its tracking systems so future administrative leave costs can be identified separately and accurately. Whether OPM implements those changes will be visible in the next GAO follow-up report, expected during the 2027 budget cycle. The broader federal workforce restructuring story is ongoing — more data on rehire costs and long-term savings claims will become available as agency audits continue.
