Federal payroll ledgers rarely make for dramatic reading, but the numbers tucked into a recent Government Accountability Office report tell a story stranger than fiction. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency set out to trim the federal workforce and squeeze waste out of Washington.
Instead, it helped produce a nearly $10 billion tab for government employees who, in many cases, were not doing any government work at all.
According to sources, the GAO found that agencies burned through an estimated $9.5 billion in salary costs on paid administrative leave in 2025 alone. That is not a modest overrun.
It represents a 435% increase in the use of paid leave between 2023 and 2025, and a sixfold jump in cost over the same period. Put simply, the government spent six times more paying people to stay home than it did just two years earlier.
Much of that spike traces directly back to DOGE’s opening move. In January, federal employees were given a narrow nine-day window to accept a deferred resignation, a deal that let them step away from their jobs while continuing to draw a paycheck through September.
Roughly 140,000 workers took the offer, many after being told, in one way or another, that their positions were likely headed for elimination anyway amid the broader push to shrink the civil service. According to the GAO, about $6.7 billion of the total administrative leave bill was tied directly to that deferred resignation program.
The irony is hard to miss. A initiative built around the promise of trimming government fat ended up writing checks to people not currently working, at a scale that dwarfed anything seen in recent budget history.
The federal workforce shrank by roughly 12% during this stretch of the administration, with more than 300,000 workers pushed out in total. Yet the savings promised from a leaner government never materialized in the way DOGE advertised.
Sen. Patty Murray, the Democratic vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, did not mince words in response to the GAO findings.
“After promising to cut waste, Trump instead set billions upon billions in taxpayer dollars on fire to quite literally pay people not to do jobs they loved, from researching cancer cures to taking care of our National Parks, and so much else,” she said.
Murray argued the approach undercut the very goal it claimed to serve.
“Trump spent billions to push out experienced and badly needed experts across government, this was the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse,” she said.
She warned the fallout would be felt well beyond any single budget cycle: “Seniors, veterans, and families will wait longer for the help they count on for years to come, all thanks to Trump’s reckless mass firing campaign, which was endorsed by Republicans in Congress who cheered these cuts and refused to join Democrats to put a stop to it.”
The paid leave bill is only one thread in a larger pattern of DOGE falling short of its own billing. Despite Musk’s early pledge to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget, Treasury figures show total federal outlays actually climbed to $7.01 trillion in 2025, up 4% from $6.75 trillion the year before.
Separate estimates from the Partnership for Public Service, cited by CBS Money Watch, put the broader cost of DOGE’s disruptions at roughly $135 billion once paid leave, the expense of rehiring wrongfully terminated staff, and lost productivity across agencies are factored in.
Some of the department’s headline “savings” claims did not survive scrutiny either. Investigators found DOGE frequently cited “ceiling values,” the maximum theoretical cost of a contract, rather than what was actually being spent. One widely touted example involved a claimed $2.9 billion in savings from canceling a contract for a migrant children’s shelter. The facility had already been empty for a year, with only a modest retainer being paid, meaning the real savings amounted to roughly 4% of the number DOGE publicized.
The push to cut costs at the IRS may have been especially self-defeating. By eliminating tax enforcement staff to save on salaries, DOGE also eliminated the employees responsible for bringing revenue in, a decision projected to cost the government $64 billion in lost tax revenue over the next decade. The fallout reportedly reached the point where unprocessed paper tax returns piled up at an IRS facility in Austin because the staff needed to digitize them had already been let go.
By November, when Reuters asked the Office of Personnel Management for an update on DOGE’s status, the response suggested the entire project had quietly evaporated: “That doesn’t exist.”
Musk himself later seemed to concede the effort had not gone as planned. Asked on Katie Miller’s podcast whether he would do it again, he replied, “I don’t think so,” adding that he would have “basically worked on my companies” instead.
Meanwhile, a far less flashy tool for recovering misspent government funds continues to quietly do its job. The False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law that lets whistleblowers sue fraudsters and keep a share of any recovered money, brought back hundreds of millions of dollars last year without a single viral post or catchy acronym attached to it.
