How Did the Deferred Resignation Program Pay Federal Workers Not to Work?
The deferred resignation program was a central piece of DOGE’s effort to shrink the federal workforce. It let employees resign voluntarily while keeping their pay and benefits for a defined period, with no expectation of reporting to a desk. A new review by the Government Accountability Office, based on federal payroll data, has put a dollar figure on that arrangement: billions of dollars in salary for people who did no work.
What the Program Did
The basic design was straightforward. A federal employee agreed to resign but chose a future date for that resignation to take effect. Until that date, the worker remained on the federal payroll. Many were placed on paid administrative leave, meaning they kept their salary, health coverage, and benefits even though they were not performing their duties.
The appeal was the same on both sides. Employees avoided the stress of a contested removal and could carry benefits through a transition period. Managers avoided long disciplinary proceedings and could treat the position as eliminated once the resignation became effective.
What the GAO Found
The GAO’s numbers show how quickly the practice scaled. Between 2023 and 2025, agencies’ use of paid administrative leave jumped 435%. In 2025 alone, agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion in salary costs on paid administrative leave — a 600% increase from 2023. The deferred resignation program accounted for nearly $7 billion of that total.
The figures do not describe severance pay or one-time buyouts. They describe ordinary wages paid to people who remained employed while not working. That distinction is what makes the program politically sensitive and budgetarily unusual.
Paid administrative leave is not new. Agencies have long used it while investigating misconduct, resolving security clearance questions, or waiting out workplace disputes. It is normally a short-term measure for a narrow set of employees. The deferred resignation program turned it into a mass workforce policy, applied at scale across the federal government.
Why It Matters
The program was supposed to save money by cutting the workforce. But its up-front cost moves in the opposite direction. Paying employees not to work creates immediate payroll obligations that cancel out some of the projected savings from smaller headcount. The GAO report suggests that DOGE’s reported workforce reductions carried a large, previously understated price tag.
The cost structure also raises a service-quality problem. A position cannot be filled while someone is still on the payroll, even if that person is not working. Agencies that shed staff through deferred resignation must carry the salary in their budgets without receiving labor in return. If the underlying workload remains, other employees must absorb it or the work goes undone.
The report does not say the program was improper. But it shows a clear trade-off: the government spent heavily to make its workforce smaller, and most of that spending went to people who were paid to stay home. Whether that trade-off was worthwhile depends on whether the long-term savings from eliminated positions will outweigh the billions paid in the short term.