The $6.7 Billion DOGE Headline Is True. It Also Leaves Out Half the Story.

Washington has discovered a government program that costs billions of dollars, and naturally, everyone is shocked.

The Government Accountability Office says federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025. Roughly $6.7 billion of that was tied to the Trump administration's Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed workers who agreed to leave government to remain on salary while generally no longer working.

From the GAO:

OPM does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts, including the deferred resignation program. One of the administration’s stated principles for current workforce reduction efforts is to trim the budget topline by reducing full-time equivalent positions. To support these efforts, federal agencies used millions of workdays of paid administrative leave. To calculate long-term savings, OPM needs to know short-term costs of paid administrative leave used for these efforts. However, OPM cannot easily and accurately do this because the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts is reported with other types of general paid administrative leave. Without a mechanism to track paid administrative leave for workforce reduction efforts, federal leaders may not have the data needed to understand whether government-wide cost saving goals are being met.

You can understand why the headlines wrote themselves. Federal workers got paid billions not to work during a program associated with DOGE, which was created to cut waste and shrink government.

One national headline simply announced that the government paid workers $9.5 billion "not to work." Another framed the program as DOGE causing the government to spend billions while supposedly saving money.

There's just one problem.

The $6.7 billion figure is an estimated one-time cost of removing workers from the federal payroll. OPM Director Scott Kupor has said the Deferred Resignation Program is expected to save more than $20 billion every year because those salaries disappear after the employees leave.

Spend $6.7 billion once to reduce annual spending by more than $20 billion, and suddenly the story sounds rather different.

Except that, Washington being Washington, there's another concern.

GAO says OPM can't accurately determine the program's actual net savings because it never established a separate payroll category to track administrative leave used for workforce reductions. Administrative leave for the resignation program was mixed together with other forms of administrative leave in the federal payroll system.

From OPM:

What They Got Wrong About the Deferred Resignation Program

This week, a Senate Democrat report took aim at OPM’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) – a voluntary retirement program that provided government employees with eight months of paid leave. Their argument? Our efforts to modernize the federal workforce somehow reflect poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you don’t have time to read the 54-page report, here’s the TLDR:

• We should never reduce government spending because we might incur one-time separation costs in doing so; and
• We should ignore the fact that in incurring those one-time costs we lower the ongoing run-rate of government spend, thus saving billions of dollars.

So OPM has a large savings claim.

GAO has a large cost estimate.

And the federal government's accounting system apparently looked at the whole arrangement and decided precision was optional.

GAO also found evidence suggesting the leave totals themselves may be overstated. Agencies reported 144% more administrative leave during pay periods containing public holidays before the resignation program began. Holidays aren't supposed to be coded as administrative leave. GAO says historical errors will remain in some publicly released data.

GAO reviewed more than 18.5 million payroll records covering about 1.6 million employees and 76 agencies. Its analysis covered roughly 95% of the civilian federal workforce. Even after reviewing all that data, GAO concluded the government still doesn't have the tracking system necessary to determine with confidence whether the workforce reductions are meeting their cost-saving goals.

This is where the story becomes more interesting than the headline.

Critics are perfectly entitled to point at $6.7 billion and ask why taxpayers paid workers for months after they stopped working.

The administration is equally entitled to answer that severance-style costs can be justified if they eliminate much larger recurring payroll expenses.

Neither argument settles the accounting.

OPM's more-than-$20-billion annual savings figure remains the administration's projection. GAO isn't endorsing it. GAO also isn't saying the Deferred Resignation Program lost taxpayers $6.7 billion on balance. Its report says something more inconvenient: the federal government doesn't yet have the data necessary to accurately calculate the answer.

And somehow, "Government Accounting Is Too Messy to Know the Final Number Yet" didn't make many headlines.

The $6.7 billion is real enough to deserve scrutiny.

So is the part people keep leaving out.

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