The $15 Billion Bill for Not Working
Summary
The federal government paid an estimated $11.1 billion to $15.1 billion in salary and benefits to nearly 140,000 employees who did no work while separating under its Deferred Resignation Program. The civilian workforce fell 256,000 employees in thirteen months — 45.6% of it at the Department of Education, 0.9% at Homeland Security.
Where 378,000 people went
Federal agencies used four separate levers in 2025: a hiring freeze, the government-wide deferred resignation program, probationary-period terminations, and formal reductions in force (RIFs). Nearly 378,000 employees left the 22 agencies covered by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 between January 2025 and January 2026 — only 127,000 were hired to replace them, for a net loss of about 256,000, or 11.3% of the workforce, according to the Government Accountability Office's June 2026 report. The bluntest instrument, the RIF, accounted for the fewest departures: just 6,331 people, 1.7% of all separations. The DRP accounted for more than twenty times that.
View data as table
| Other retirements/resignations | 172,527 | 45.7% of separations |
|---|---|---|
| Deferred Resignation Program | 128,589 | 34.0% |
| Other terminations/removals | 39,848 | 10.5% |
| Early retirement (RIF/reorg) | 10,243 | 2.7% |
| Terminated in probationary period | 6,697 | 1.8% |
| Separated through a RIF | 6,331 | 1.7% |
| All other separations | 13,487 | 3.6% |
| Total | 377,722 | 100% |
had originally approved about 144,000 employees for a deferred resignation in the first half of 2025. By 's count, 128,589 ultimately separated under the DRP — some rescinded their applications to avoid critical staffing gaps, some were later found ineligible, and some left under a different authority instead. A separate analysis by Public Citizen, built from 's own Enterprise Human Resources Integration payroll data through March 2026, counted 139,628 total DRP participants and used their monthly salaries to price the paid administrative leave they sat on before separating: between $11.1 billion and $15.1 billion, depending on how many months each cohort spent on leave before their separation date. told Bloomberg Law the resulting headcount reduction is projected to save roughly $20 billion a year — a figure that, unlike the money already spent, has not yet shown up in any published accounting. Public Citizen also found at least ten agencies had rehired employees they had just paid to leave.
The RIF route stayed rare partly because Congress made it illegal for eleven weeks. The Continuing Appropriations Act, 2026, enacted November 12, 2025 to end a 42-day shutdown, retroactively voided every RIF notice agencies had issued between October 1 and November 12 and barred any new ones through January 30, 2026. The program that paid people not to work was never paused. The program that would have simply ended their jobs was — for eleven of the fifty-two weeks that mattered most.
The same cut, by agency
Averaged across all 22 agencies, the workforce shrank 11.3%. Almost none of them actually landed near that average. The decline ranged from under 1% at the Department of Homeland Security to more than 45% at the Department of Education — and, per , two agencies that declined to report data directly, the Small Business Administration and , showed even steeper drops in 's own public figures.
View data as table
| USAID | -95.0% | OPM Federal Workforce Data |
|---|---|---|
| Dept. of Education | -45.6% | GAO Table 1 |
| Small Business Admin. | -37.0% | OPM Federal Workforce Data |
| General Services Admin. | -36.8% | GAO Table 1 |
| Office of Personnel Mgmt. | -33.9% | GAO Table 1 |
| Housing & Urban Dev. | -30.5% | GAO Table 1 |
| Dept. of the Treasury | -26.1% | GAO Table 1 |
| Dept. of Labor | -23.1% | GAO Table 1 |
| All 22 CFO Act agencies | -11.3% | GAO reported aggregate |
| Homeland Security | -0.9% | GAO Table 1 |
's workforce fell from 4,895 to 258 — a 95% decline, the deepest of any agency tracked, on top of the aid dollars the agency separately stopped disbursing. The Department of Education, the target of a standalone dismantlement effort, went from 4,273 employees to 2,326, down 45.6%. The Office of Personnel Management — the agency that wrote the DRP guidance, ran the "Fork in the Road" email, and now publishes the government's workforce statistics — cut its own staff from 3,037 to 2,006, a 33.9% drop, deeper than the Department of the Treasury (−26.1%) or the Department of Labor (−23.1%). Homeland Security, the agency carrying out immigration enforcement, moved by less than one percentage point.
The takeaway
- The expensive option ran, uninterrupted. The Deferred Resignation Program — full salary and benefits for months of no work, an estimated $11.1 billion to $15.1 billion total — never stopped. The cheaper, faster option, the RIF, was frozen by statute for eleven weeks in the middle of the reduction.
- "The federal workforce" isn't one number. An 11.3% average decline hid a 50-point spread — from Homeland Security, functionally untouched, to , all but eliminated, with the Department of Education and the agency that ran the whole program, , both cut by roughly a third.
- The savings are still a projection. 's $20 billion-a-year estimate is a forecast; the $11.1–$15.1 billion already paid to non-working employees, and the rehiring of some of them, are in the record.
Workforce figures cover the 22 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies that reported complete data to for all of 2025, plus and figures separately cites from 's public Federal Workforce Data website; cost figures are Public Citizen's estimate from payroll data and carry the assumptions described in its methodology.
Sources
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, Federal Agency Workforce Changes: Update for July 2025 to January 2026 (-26-108583, June 17, 2026) — the source for total separations, hires, the 22-agency and agency-level workforce tables, the DRP separation count, and the RIF freeze timeline. gao.gov
- Public Citizen, Trump's $11 Billion Resignation Program (June 18, 2026) — cost estimate for paid administrative leave under the DRP, built from Enterprise Human Resources Integration payroll data, plus the finding that agencies rehired former DRP participants. citizen.org
- Office of Personnel Management, Guidance Regarding Deferred Resignation Program (Jan. 28, 2025) and the "Fork in the Road" program page — the original terms of the offer. opm.gov/fork
- Bloomberg Law, Trump Buyouts Paid $11 Billion for Not Working, Report Estimates — 's on-record $20 billion-a-year projected savings figure. news.bloomberglaw.com
- Congress.gov, H.R. 5371, Continuing Appropriations Act, 2026 (Public Law 119-37) — the statute that retroactively voided October–November 2025 RIF notices and barred new ones through January 30, 2026. congress.gov
Comments
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The government's preferred tool for shrinking itself in 2025 was not the layoff. It was the buyout: resign now, get paid your full salary and benefits anyway, for months, and simply stop showing up. That instrument — the Deferred Resignation Program, or "Fork in the Road" — moved nearly 140,000 people off the payroll. It also cost more, for longer, than cutting them outright would have, and it landed on some agencies almost twenty times harder than others.