The largest mass resignation in history has become a multi-billion dollar headache for the U.S. government.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyzing payroll data found a 435% increase in federal agencies’ use of administrative leave between 2023 and 2025, amounting to $9.5 billion in paid salaries to off-the-clock employees. The watchdog attributed $6.7 billion of the total to the deferred resignation program implemented under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as part of its efforts to cut down the federal workforce.
Civilian salaries and benefits make up about 5.5% of the federal budget, yet were among the first of Elon Musk’s cuts to federal spending. In February 2025, DOGE sent out a “Fork in the Road” email to 2 million federal workers, offering them the opportunity to voluntarily resign while receiving full pay and benefits through the end of September that year. Nearly 140,000 employees took the deal, according to federal data.
OPM Director Scott Kupor disputed the GAO’s findings, claiming in a recent Substack post personnel cuts will save taxpayers money over time following the removal of these individuals from the government payroll.
“The GAO report fails to highlight the difference between a one-time expense ($9.5 billion) to reduce the size of the federal government by 270,000 employees and the $40 billion per year savings in taxpayer dollars that this reduction provides,” Kupor told Fortune in a statement. “That 400% return on investment is a massive benefit to the taxpayer.”
To be sure, the GAO said the accuracy of the data may be impacted by differences in how agencies report administrative leave, a persistent issue spanning administrations. A 2014 GAO report found differences in how the Department of Defense and the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development grant leave, calling on OPM to develop guidance to standardize how this time is recorded.
Musk assembled the special advisory in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second administration in order to curb government fraud and waste, claiming to have saved taxpayers $215 billion from cancelled grants and contracts and workforce reductions, though experts have disputed the actual savings as much less. The federal deficit and government spending have increased during Trump’s second term, with the U.S. debt growing by around $3.8 trillion since January 2025.
Since DOGE’s first cuts, the government workforce is about 12% smaller, with more than 271,000 federal employees leaving the government since Trump took office a second time.
The impact of deferred resignation beyond the dollars
Federal employment think tanks have already sounded the alarm about the impact of the deferred resignation program on federal government operations. Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit assisting in government worker recruitment, noted in a report released last month many agencies have or are looking to backfill more than 20,000 roles left vacant from the program.
In many cases, these roles are being filled by new employees who lack the specialization or institutional knowledge of the workers they are replacing, according to the nonprofit, threatening the efficiency of an agency’s mandates. On average, these new hires have a general schedule (GS) grade—the system determining the classification and pay of federal employees—that is 1.4 grades lower than those employees who left under the deferred resignation program, the report found. These GS grade differences were especially pronounced in criminal investigation jobs, with a -6.1 GS differential between new and old employees in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
The nonprofit suggested the impact of these hiring changes are already being felt by both the government workforce and everyday Americans. It noted job listings in 54 cities between March and August 2025 for U.S. Department of Agriculture consumer safety inspector positions left vacant in offices where employees who accepted deferred resignation once worked. The openings correlate with a 40% increase in consumer complaints about meat and egg products last year, as well as a cyclospora outbreak public health experts have linked with DOGE-related cuts to foreign inspection personnel and parasite tracking programs.
“While it is impossible to fully quantify this loss of institutional knowledge and capacity, one thing is clear,” the report said. “The DRP has made it harder for agencies across the government to serve the public.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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