Taxpayers footed a $6.7 billion bill for President Trump’s buyouts to get federal employees to quit in 2025, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Another report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management projected that those cuts to the federal workforce will save taxpayers more than $20 billion annually.
Federal employees who accepted the buyouts were offered continued pay and benefits through the end of September, in exchange for submitting their resignation by February.
Over 144,000 employees accepted buyouts in 2025, totaling 70% of paid administrative leave used that year, according to the report Tuesday from GOA, Congress’ independent spending watchdog.
Federal agencies’ use of paid administrative leave increased by 435% from 2023 to 2025, while the number of employees granted any paid administrative leave rose from about 750,000 to nearly 900,000 in the same period.
Paid administrative leave salary costs reached $9.5 billion government-wide in 2025, a sixfold increase from 2023, as a result of the buyouts.
At the same time, the average amount of leave each employee used jumped from about 5 workdays to about 24 workdays, an increase driven by both more people taking leave and each person taking much more of it.
GAO also found that from 2023 through 2025, 779 individual employees reported more than one work year of paid administrative leave, with an estimated total salary cost of about $108 million.
The report said that OPM, which oversees the federal civilian workforce and the buyout program, does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts.
“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,” the report reads.
GAO recommended that OPM publicly disclose data-reliability issues, such as holiday leave being misreported as paid administrative leave, to improve transparency.
It also recommended OPM create a new tracking category in its payroll system specifically for workforce-reduction leave, since leave is currently lumped in with general administrative leave, making it impossible to isolate true costs.
OPM agreed with both recommendations.
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