The Trump Administration Paid Federal Workers $9.5 Billion To Skip Work

Federal employees were paid $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, in large part because of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce and reduce spending.

Only one of those goals has been accomplished.

That $9.5 billion figure represents a 435 percent increase in paid administrative leave over 2023 totals, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported this week. In all, federal workers received paid administrative leave for about 21.6 million work days during 2025—up from about 4 million days off in 2023 and 2024, the GAO noted.

Much of that administrative leave spending was tied to a deferred resignation program that was established by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in the early days of the second Trump administration. Federal workers who agreed to resign their posts by February 12, 2025, were allowed to keep getting paid through the end of September, when the federal fiscal year ended. About 140,000 workers took the offer.

The OPM instructed federal agencies to place those workers on administrative leave and reassign their responsibilities. About $6.7 billion of the $9.5 billion in administrative leave costs from 2025 were connected to the deferred retirement program, according to the new GAO report.

Was it worth it? The deferred retirement effort certainly shrank the size of the federal workforce. When Trump took the oath of office for a second time in January 2025, there were more than 3 million people working for the federal government. Last month, there were fewer than 2.7 million on federal payrolls. Cutting 10 percent of the federal workforce is one of the few truly libertarian accomplishments for the Trump administration—and, absent any other context, might be worth the one-time cost of a $6.7 billion carrot that got many of those workers to voluntarily give up their jobs.

But any praise for Trump’s pruning of the federal workforce requires a few other considerations.

First, simply firing workers doesn’t meaningfully reduce the cost of government—and that’s what really matters. Federal spending during this fiscal year is projected to be about $400 billion higher than in 2025, and the federal budget deficit is expected to be larger as well. Saving money requires shutting down or privatizing governmental functions.

Second, the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the federal workforce have been undermined by its eagerness to hire more immigration enforcement agents and other law enforcement personnel.

In January, for example, the Department of Homeland Security bragged in a press release that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had more than doubled its workforce in a year. As part of that recruitment effort, the agency had offered $50,000 signing bonuses and student loan forgiveness for new recruits. A whistleblower testified before Congress earlier this year that ICE also cut corners on training its cadre of new recruits.

Replacing paper-pushing bureaucrats with heavily armed, poorly trained thugs is not a win for liberty or a step toward a smaller government, even if the size of the federal payroll shrinks.

Finally, some of the payroll cuts are now being undone. The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that advocates for reforming the federal workforce to make it more effective, calculates that about 20,000 of the positions left vacant due to the deferred retirement program have now been replaced or rehired. That is probably inevitable in the wake of a hasty attempt to cut as many jobs as possible in a short amount of time.

Laudable as it may be, the Trump administration’s attempts at cutting the federal workforce are turning out to be more costly and less effective than they might at first have seemed.

The post The Trump Administration Paid Federal Workers $9.5 Billion To Skip Work appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/09/18/the-trump-administration-paid-federal-workers-9-5-billion-to-skip-work/