Federal Workers Cost $9.5B in Paid Leave Under DOGE Efficiency Push

The Department of Government Efficiency set out to shrink the federal workforce. What it produced instead was a bill that few anticipated: $9.5 billion spent on paid administrative leave in 2025 alone.

That figure represents a 435 percent increase from the year before. The mechanism was straightforward enough. Rather than laying off workers outright, the department placed federal employees on administrative leave—a status that kept them on the payroll, drawing full compensation, while effectively removing them from their posts. It was a way to reduce the active workforce without the legal and procedural complications of termination.

The strategy created an unusual paradox at the heart of the efficiency initiative. The goal was to cut costs and trim government spending. Instead, the government found itself paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee, in aggregate, to keep workers on the books while they sat idle. A worker on administrative leave receives their salary and benefits as though they were working, but they are not performing their duties. The leave can stretch for months or longer, depending on the circumstances and the agency involved.

The $9.5 billion figure captures the full scope of what this approach cost in a single year. To put that in perspective, it is money that went directly into the pockets of federal employees who were not at their desks, not answering phones, not processing applications or managing programs. It is money that did not go toward reducing the deficit or cutting the size of government in any meaningful sense. It simply moved the cost around.

Agencies across the federal government implemented the policy with varying degrees of intensity. Some departments placed dozens of workers on leave; others placed hundreds. The Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Social Security Administration were among the largest users of the mechanism. In some cases, employees remained on leave for the entire year. In others, the leave lasted weeks or months before workers were either reinstated or formally separated.

The human impact was significant. Federal employees found themselves in a state of limbo—still employed, still receiving paychecks, but cut off from their work, their colleagues, and the sense of purpose that many drew from their jobs. Some employees used the time to look for work elsewhere. Others waited, uncertain whether they would be called back. The psychological toll of administrative leave, even when paid, is not trivial. Workers are often barred from entering their offices, from accessing their email, from knowing what is happening in their departments.

The fiscal outcome raised immediate questions about whether the efficiency initiative was working as intended. If the goal was to reduce government spending, the 435 percent surge in administrative leave costs suggested the opposite was happening. The department had found a way to shrink the workforce on paper while the actual budget impact grew substantially. Critics pointed out that the money spent on paid leave could have funded thousands of government positions, or been redirected to deficit reduction, or used to improve services to the public.

By late 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency faced pressure to justify the costs and explain why workforce reduction had become so expensive. The question hanging over the initiative was whether this approach would continue, whether it would be modified, or whether the government would return to more traditional methods of workforce adjustment. What remained clear was that efficiency, at least as it had been pursued, had come with a price tag that few had anticipated when the program began.