Public Citizen cites Social Security delays, VA wait times as DOGE fallout
The Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog, released the report Tuesday documenting how federal agencies’ use of paid administrative leave ballooned over the two-year period. The GAO defined paid administrative leave as “an excused absence without loss of pay or charge to leave,” noting that “it is a cost to taxpayers as employees receive full pay without performing job duties.”
Across the 76 federal agencies reviewed, the total number of paid administrative leave workdays rose from approximately 4 million in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024 to approximately 21.6 million in 2025, according to the GAO. The 2025 cost of $9.5 billion was approximately six times what the government spent on paid administrative leave in 2023. About $6.7 billion of the 2025 total — roughly 70% — was associated with the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, which offered federal employees the option to leave government service while continuing to receive pay. Under the program, 144,312 employees across the 76 agencies reviewed took paid administrative leave.
The deferred resignation program was a central mechanism of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative spearheaded by Elon Musk to shrink the federal workforce. Since January 2023, the Trump administration has reduced the federal workforce by approximately 355,000 employees, leaving many struggling to find new jobs while others have been rehired after the administration determined that too many positions had been eliminated.
Douglas Pasternak, research director of Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project, told the Guardian that the federal overhaul had been “haphazard.” “There are multiple examples of how this was not thought out,” Pasternak said. “It’s very clear that the Trump administration gave zero forethought to these cuts and to these deferred resignation programs. They haphazardly went out and cut federal workers, and now we’re dealing with the ripple effects of that.”
Pasternak cited specific operational consequences he attributed to the workforce reductions, including delays in Social Security check deliveries, longer wait times at Veterans Affairs hospitals for patients seeking medical and mental health care, reductions in federal firefighter staffing, and reductions at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has since sought to rehire personnel.
“It’s a case study in mismanagement in how people went about this and it impacted everyone of all political stripes,” Pasternak said. “To simply say we’re going to have fewer workers and therefore less costs is not the way to look at this. You need to look at it in a more sophisticated way, like what do those workers actually do? How do they improve the government? How do they actually help provide critical resources for the American public?”
Senator Patty Murray, the vice-chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, released a statement after the report’s release condemning the federal layoffs. “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,” Murray said. “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 added.