Lawmakers see waste in DOGE’s ‘stupid’ $7B buyout costs

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Lawmakers see waste in DOGE’s ‘stupid’ $7B buyout costs
A new government report showing that the administration spent $7 billion paying staff not to work as it pushed its buyouts is sparking the latest round of scrutiny of President Trump’s DOGE era.
A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated the administration spent $6.7 billion on administrative leave after Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader Elon Musk launched the buyouts.
Employees who took the buyout were paid through the end of the fiscal year, with some workers free from their duties for months on end while still receiving a paycheck as part of their deferred resignation.
The report issued Tuesday found that compared with 2023, use of paid leave in 2025 jumped 435 percent.
To lawmakers whose districts include federal workers from the D.C. area, the report is a referendum on Trump and Musk’s approach to the workforce in the name of efficiency.
“First of all, how stupid was it to pay people to stay home for four or five months — or longer — getting paid, and they don’t have to do anything, and we’ve robbed the American people of the services they were providing,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), whose district of roughly 80,000 federal workers saw 20,000 lose their jobs early in the Trump administration.
“There are ways to be more efficient. There are ways to shrink the headcount, and DOGE did it in the absolute stupidest way.”
The report’s findings show an astounding jump in paid leave by almost every metric.
Salary costs attributable to paid leave jumped sixfold between 2023 and 2025.
Total workdays of paid administrative leave went from around 4 million before Trump to 21.6 million workdays in 2025.
And while in 2023 and 2024 just 600 federal workers across the whole of government took more than three months paid leave, in 2025 that number jumped to almost 100,000.
The GAO estimates that 144,312 federal workers used the deferred resignation program.
“I’m not surprised,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) said of the cost of firing people.
“We were saying that it makes more sense to keep the people who actually get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government employed. It also makes sense to support our federal workers at a time when you know there’s a transition in government. Instead, they gave people this option and paid people not to work, and as a result, we’re going to see more reports like this come out, showing how much money was lost and how much taxpayer money was wasted.”
The Trump administration has defended the cost of the buyouts, noting that paid leave costs are akin to salary costs they would have paid for those workers anyway.
Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor noted that 270,000 federal workers have left government since the start of the Trump administration, whether that’s through the buyouts, layoffs or other methods.
The GAO’s report found the administration spent $9.5 billion on paid leave, though it attributed $6.7 billion to the buyouts.
“For the sake of argument, let’s charge the entire $9.5 billion to DRP anyway. It was a one-time expense. What did the taxpayer get for it? Using rough averages, the fully loaded cost of a federal employee is about $150,000 per year. For 270,000 employees, that is more than $40 billion in annual costs. These are not one-time costs, but costs incurred every year in perpetuity,” Kupor wrote in a blog post.
“So, for a one-time expense of at most $9.5 billion, taxpayers save more than $40 billion each year. That’s a 400+% annual return, and the outlay paid for itself in under six months.”
The White House did not respond to request for comment.
Critics argue the Trump administration is failing to take numerous other aspects into account.
The Partnership for Public Service estimates that 132,000 took the buyout. That with another 10,000 in layoffs and a combination of early and regular retirements contributed to an unprecedented 319,000 government workers leaving in 2025 — double the yearly average.
But the group also found that the government then hired 20,557 people to backfill roles of those who took the buyout, noting that those new hires “tend to come with less experience.”
“All the work that these people are doing. How is that work getting done? Have they contracted out any of that work, have they rehired people to perform that same work, which we know they have done?” said Andrew Huddleston, director of advocacy at the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union.
“So you’ve got to net all that stuff out at the end to be able to prove any real savings over time, and it’s unclear to me that they’ve done that, or that they plan to do that. But even the sort of top line numbers that they’ve got here are, I think, shocking, probably to most Americans.”
Beyer said many of those who left had significant experience and institutional knowledge.
“We’ve seen again and again how stupid it is to take people that have been doing a job for 20 or 25 or 30 years, know it really, really well, and you force them out either DOGE and RIFs, fork in the road, whatever. Then you have to hire brand new people who don’t know the job at all, and usually it takes months or years to learn it and to do just as well,” he said, referencing a reduction in force (RIF), the process the government uses to carry out layoffs.
“They aren’t bad people; they just — they’re starting from scratch.”
Rep. Glenn Ivey (D), whose Maryland district has many federal workers, also said the cuts were made without any precision or insight into what programs were being cut.
Musk is “running around like a nut, waving a chainsaw around, and brought in all these people that didn’t know what they were doing or anything about the agencies where they were making these cuts, or anything about the programs and policies that they were undermining and killing,” he told The Hill.
“It’s probably one of the most egregious mismanagement enterprises I’ve seen in the government in my 50 years around this town.”
Subramanyam said he believed the report was a “conservative estimate” and that a more fulsome cost-benefit analysis would need to look at losses to programs and of expertise.
“A person who is working on food safety who gets a fork letter and they leave and then there’s a salmonella outbreak because they’re not there anymore — you can put a dollar figure on that. But how do you know the cancers you didn’t cure, or the diseases you didn’t prevent, or the wars you didn’t start, right?” he said.
“It’s going to reverberate for a long time, as well as the talent that we are dissuading from joining the federal workforce for years to come. A lot of people used to think of the federal government as an attractive job where maybe you get paid less, but then you can get benefits, get job security, and also do important work for the American people, regardless of who’s president. And what’s happening instead is now people may not want to work for the federal government anymore.”
DOGE has faced backlash over its other cuts, including to government spending more broadly.
Numerous reports have found DOGE consistently overestimated the amount of its cost-cutting efforts.
An August report from the GAO found the agency’s “wall of receipts” took credit for cost-savings measures already in the works when it was created, while “DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings.”
Huddleston said the Trump administration has yet to make that case that DOGE lived up to its name.
“It was extraordinarily expensive to the American people, and it’s really unclear what it is that we got out of it. I don’t know that if you ask the American people today if it seems like the government is running more effectively or efficiently that they’re answering yes,” he said.
“It doesn’t seem that way to me. … It seems like the entire enterprise has been a colossal failure.”
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