The Trump administration paid federal employees $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, part of the president’s plan to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy and government spending, according to a new estimate from a congressional watchdog.
The Department of Government Efficiency’s program to shrink the federal work force through deferred resignations increased the use of paid administrative leave by 435 percent during the first year of President Trump’s second term, the Government Accountability Office said in a report on Tuesday. That represents a sixfold increase since 2023.
Drastically reducing the size of the federal work force was part of a broader Trump administration plan to rein in what it called frivolous and wasteful federal spending, with an initial promise of $1 trillion in savings.
The administration has said its efforts have led to more than $200 billion in savings, a figure that outside experts have not independently confirmed. In addition, the federal deficit has increased since Mr. Trump returned to office, in part because of the war in Iran and the sweeping tax cuts that Republicans enacted in 2025.
During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a government initiative to cut spending “is coming.”
Spending on civilian salaries and benefits represents a small fraction of the total federal budget. Yet it was among the Trump administration’s first targets for cutting costs.
In a January 2025 email, the Trump administration offered a proposition to about two million federal workers with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” It was billed as a one-time-only offer to pay workers through September 2025 if they resigned within the next nine days. The offer came with the warning to the employees that they were likely to be fired eventually as the Trump administration sought to decrease the size of the federal government.
The federal civilian work force has shrunk by about 12 percent since Mr. Trump returned to office, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management, as a result of resignations, firings and new hires. But the agency has not been able to identify the long- term savings, the accountability office found.
The Office of Personnel Management did not respond to a request for comment.
Of the $9.5 billion in paid administrative leave, the congressional watchdog said that about $6.7 billion was associated with the deferred resignation program, which agencies continued to offer at other points during 2025. According to federal data, 139,963 federal employees took the deferred resignation offer.
The largest number of deferred resignations were among civilian employees at the Agriculture, Defense and Treasury Departments.
Critics have faulted the Trump administration for losing generations of expertise in the purge at the expense of Americans who have relied on federal programs.
“Trump spent billions to push out experienced and badly needed experts across government — this was the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Hasty efforts to achieve Mr. Trump’s downsizing mandates led some agencies to rescind deferred resignation offers or hire people to replace employees who left. The Partnership for Public Service, which advocates a more effective federal work force, found that the federal government has backfilled more than 20,000 positions left vacant because of deferred resignations.
Since the downsizing, the federal government has initiated recruiting efforts to hire employees, including lawyers and tech workers, after so many departures in 2025. There has also been an emphasis in hiring more early-career employees.
“What I really want to see is more people like Big Balls,” Scott Kupor, the director of the personnel office, said on Monday in an interview with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. Mr. Kupor was using the online pseudonym for Edward Coristine, the DOGE employee who was hired at 19 last year to slash the federal bureaucracy.
“We need people who are patriotic, who say: ‘You know what? I care about this country. I’m willing to do something good,’” Mr. Kupor said, making the case that young hires like Mr. Coristine can work in the federal government for a couple of years and not an entire career. Mr. Coristine now works in a new White House office focused on improving the design of government websites.
Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.
