The Trump administration is paying more than 154,000 federal employees not to work as a result of its deferred resignation program, part of a larger effort to slash the government workforce.
The number was reported Thursday by The Washington Post, which cited sources at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the government’s human resources agency. The tally includes employees across federal agencies who accepted an offer to voluntarily leave their jobs while continuing to get paid through September or the end of the year, depending on the offer. It does not include the many thousands of workers who were fired. “The employees who have resigned amount to about 6.7 percent of the government’s civilian workforce of 2.3 million people,” The Post’s Meryl Kornfield, Hannah Natanson and Laura Meckler note.
Senate Democrats on Thursday issued a separate analysis that said the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has generated at least $21.7 billion in waste, including $14.8 billion for the deferred resignation program’s paying employees not to work. The latter figure was reportedly calculated based on the average federal salary and an estimate that 200,000 employees resigned.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who released the Senate report, said it was an indictment of the DOGE effort and the Trump administration’s priorities. “At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion,” Blumenthal said.
OPM defended the deferred resignation program and criticized the Democrats’ report.
“Ultimately, the deferred resignation program was not only legal, it provided over 150,000 civil servants a dignified and generous departure from the federal government,” OPM spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover said in a statement to the Post. “It also delivered incredible relief to the American taxpayer. No previous administration has gotten even close to saving American taxpayers this amount of money in such a short amount of time.”
In an online post, OPM Director Scott Kupor accused the Democrats of ignoring long-run annual savings of $20 billion or more by focusing only on the one-time costs involved in the resignations.
“It’s backward logic like this that got us in our current financial dire straits – $7 trillion in annual spend (up 50% since 2019) and $36 trillion in total debt (increasing to the tune of $2 trillion per year)!” Kupor wrote. “As for costs? Much of what these Senate Democrats points to is a direct result of the legal and bureaucratic muddle we operate in. If the federal government had a modern, at-will employment framework like most employers, we wouldn’t need complex workarounds or face sky-high administrative overhead just to get things done.”