A new Government Accountability Office report adds fresh scrutiny to the Trump administration’s push to shrink the federal workforce through its DOGE agenda. The report, released September 15, found agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion in 2025 paying employees on administrative leave rather than having them perform their jobs. The White House has defended that spending as a one-time cost tied to a larger reduction in payroll.
GAO details the $9.5 billion leave cost tied to workforce cuts
The Government Accountability Office said in its September 2026 report that federal agencies in its review spent an estimated $9.5 billion in salary costs on paid administrative leave in calendar year 2025. GAO said that was a sixfold increase from 2023 and traced much of the increase to the Deferred Resignation Program, a government-wide initiative managed by the Office of Personnel Management. Under that program, employees who agreed to resign or retire were generally allowed to remain on paid leave until September 30, 2025, while continuing to receive salary and benefits.
GAO estimated that about $6.7 billion of the 2025 total was associated with the Deferred Resignation Program. The watchdog said OPM directed agencies to use paid administrative leave to support the program during restructuring or office closures. GAO also said OPM does not know the actual costs of all paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts because leave tied to the program was not consistently tracked as a separate category across agencies.
The administration pushed back on the report’s framing. In statements reported by CBS News and other outlets, a White House spokesperson said the $9.5 billion should be viewed as a one-time expense used to reduce the federal workforce by about 270,000 employees. The spokesperson said that reduction is expected to produce roughly $40 billion in annual savings, which the administration described as a 400% return on investment.
Because the GAO review examined federal personnel policy across agencies, its clearest impact is in the Washington region, where many civilian agencies are headquartered and where workforce changes have been concentrated. The report confirms that the rise in paid leave was tied to a national downsizing effort, not to one department or one local office. It also confirms that the administrative leave surge followed guidance from OPM, the federal government’s central human resources agency.
What remains unclear is how the $9.5 billion breaks down by state, metro area, or individual agency location. GAO did not publish a state-by-state accounting of leave costs in the report summary, and the administration has not released a comprehensive local list showing where affected employees were based. That means readers in any one state can confirm the national spending figure, but not a final local tally from the public documents now available.
Separate GAO reviews have shown the workforce changes were broad. In an earlier update covering January through June 2025, GAO said 144,000 employees had been approved for deferred resignation by midyear at major federal agencies, with additional reductions occurring through layoffs and other exits. Those figures illustrate the scale of the administration’s effort, but they do not by themselves establish how many workers in each city or state were placed on leave.
The cost stems from the structure of the Deferred Resignation Program itself. OPM guidance said eligible employees who accepted the offer could keep full pay and benefits through September 30, 2025, even if they were exempted from in-person work requirements and placed on administrative leave for much of that period. GAO said that design sharply increased paid leave usage, while the Administrative Leave Act had already reflected congressional concern that agencies could overuse that status.
The report also arrives amid broader questions about DOGE’s savings claims. In an August 2026 report, GAO said DOGE’s online “Wall of Receipts” needed more transparency and that some posted savings figures for contracts, grants and leases were incorrect or lacked supporting evidence. A separate GAO review found that 40% of the contract savings it examined could not be tied to a clear methodology. Those findings do not directly alter the $9.5 billion leave estimate, but they provide context for why watchdog scrutiny has intensified.
For residents and federal workers, the practical takeaway is that the debate has shifted from whether the paid leave costs were large to whether the administration can document offsetting savings over time. The White House continues to say DOGE reforms have generated major taxpayer savings, while GAO has said parts of those claims remain unsupported or incomplete in public reporting. For now, the clearest confirmed figure is the one in the September 15 GAO report: $9.5 billion in paid administrative leave costs during 2025.