DOGE was sold to us as the end of waste. Shrink the federal government, and taxpayers would save a fortune.

On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office — the nonpartisan watchdog that works for Congress — added up one piece of what it actually cost. Federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion in 2025 paying workers who were on paid leave instead of doing their jobs. That is about six times what they spent in 2023. And about $6.7 billion of it, GAO found, came from one piece of DOGE's push to shrink the government: the "deferred resignation" buyout the Trump administration offered federal workers in January 2025.

GAO is blunt about what paid leave means. It is "a cost to taxpayers as employees receive full pay without performing job duties."

The New York Times put it in a headline: federal employees were paid $9.5 billion not to work.

"Regardless of your daily workload"

The buyout started with an email called "Fork in the Road." In January 2025, it went to about two million federal workers.

The deal was simple. Quit now, and keep getting paid for months. The Office of Personnel Management's own email promised that anyone who took it "will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload" until September 30, 2025.

It also came with a warning for everyone who stayed. "The majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized," the email said, and "we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency."

So people took the money. According to federal data, 139,963 federal employees left through the deferred resignation programs, TIME reported. The Times reports the most came from the Agriculture, Defense and Treasury Departments. Some agencies later offered new rounds of the deal.

The personnel office told agencies to put people who took the deal on paid leave until they left. That is where the billions went.

The administration can't say what it cost

Here is the part that should bother anyone who actually cares about waste.

The Office of Personnel Management — the agency that runs the federal workforce — does not know what the buyouts cost. That's not our read. It is GAO's finding, word for word:

"OPM does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts, including the deferred resignation program."

Why not? Because when agencies put buyout workers on paid leave, they logged it together with every other kind of paid leave. Nobody built a way to keep it separate. GAO had to work out its own $6.7 billion estimate from program assumptions and payroll records.

And GAO spells out why that matters. You cannot figure out what a cut saves over the long run if you don't know what it cost up front. In GAO's words, without a way to track it, "federal leaders may not have the data needed to understand whether government-wide cost saving goals are being met."

GAO's numbers aren't perfect either, and it says so. Agencies have been logging some holidays as paid leave, which could make the total look bigger than it was. The personnel office has issued guidance to help fix that — but GAO found it does not plan to go back and fix the old data it has already put out to the public.

A government that claims to be hunting for waste handed out billions in paychecks for no work, and didn't set up a way to count them.

"The savings recur every year"

The man running the personnel office has an answer. Director Scott Kupor wrote back to GAO that his office expects the workforce cuts to save $20 billion a year, and that the $6.7 billion was a one-time cost.

"This distinction is crucial," he wrote. "The savings recur every year, while the administrative leave costs with the DRP were incurred once."

Maybe. But that $20 billion is an expectation from the same office GAO just said can't measure what the buyouts cost. And this isn't the first time the watchdog couldn't back up DOGE's math. In August, GAO reported that DOGE couldn't show how it calculated 96 percent of the grant savings it claimed — and wouldn't answer GAO's questions.

Elon Musk once promised DOGE would cut $2 trillion. By the time DOGE expired on July 4 with no final report, its own website claimed $215 billion. Nobody outside the administration has confirmed that number.

Paying people to leave — then hiring people to replace them

There's another problem with the "one-time cost" story. A lot of those jobs needed doing.

The Partnership for Public Service, a group that pushes for a more effective federal workforce, counted 20,557 new hires by June 2026 in the same kinds of jobs that people had just been paid to leave, according to TIME.

Think about what that means. Taxpayers paid workers for months to leave. Then agencies went out and hired new people for the same kinds of jobs.

The Times reports the government has since started recruiting lawyers and tech workers after so many people walked out in 2025. And Kupor knows exactly who he wants. On Monday, he told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson: "What I really want to see is more people like Big Balls."

"Big Balls" is the online nickname of Edward Coristine, the DOGE staffer who was hired at 19 to slash the federal government.

Who got hurt

The federal civilian workforce is down about 12 percent since Trump took office — a net loss of 271,363 people by July, according to federal data cited by TIME. Some agencies were gutted. Between December 2024 and January 2026, a separate GAO review found, the Education Department's staff fell 46 percent and HUD's fell 31 percent.

At the USDA alone, more than 20,000 workers are gone, and a reorganization announced in July 2025 left more than 2,500 others to move across the country or quit.

Plenty of the people pushed out haven't landed on their feet, either. When NBC News tracked down 13 people who lost federal jobs or took the buyout a year later, seven were still unemployed. Back in April 2025, South Carolina Republican William Timmons, who sits on the House Oversight Committee's DOGE subcommittee, had called pushing workers out "freeing the bureaucrats" and "just fantastic."

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, summed up the result in a statement: "Trump spent billions to push out experienced and badly needed experts across government — this was the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse."

What the report shows

The Trump administration paid federal workers an estimated $6.7 billion in 2025 to stay on paid leave, not working, after they took DOGE's "Fork in the Road" buyout — part of $9.5 billion in paid leave that year, about six times the 2023 level. GAO found the Office of Personnel Management doesn't know what the buyouts actually cost, because it never set up a way to track them — and without that, it can't accurately work out what they saved. Meanwhile, agencies have hired more than 20,000 people into the same kinds of jobs that 139,963 workers were paid to leave.

Source

This post is based on The New York Times: "Federal Employees Were Paid $9.5 Billion Not to Work in 2025 Under DOGE Effort" by Eileen Sullivan (September 15, 2026), and the Government Accountability Office report GAO-26-108477. Photo: Julia Nikhinson for The New York Times.