Trump Administration Spent at Least $11 Billion Paying Federal Workers Not to Work
Source: MEDIAite
Jun 24th, 2026, 4:24 pm
The nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, Public Citizen, dug through publicly available data from the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and found that Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s DOGE cuts resulted in federal employees being paid “at least $11 billion – and likely much more – not to work.”
The group did a deep dive study into the cost of Trump’s federal employment cuts and noted that the “total reflects only the lower end of estimated costs for the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) – inspired by Elon Musk in the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM’s) infamous “Fork in the Road” email, and it does not look at other federal efforts to reduce the number of federal workers.”. Musk’s DRP refers to the 139,628 federal employees who took an offer from DOGE to resign their jobs in early January of 2025 but still get paid through October. The report added:
A second DRP offer, known as DRP 2.0, began in April 2025 and paid employees through September 30, 2025, unless they planned to retire by the end of the year and could then be paid up until December 31, 2025, when they separated from federal service. The result was that nearly 140,000 federal workers were paid not to work for weeks or, in most cases, months.
Based on OPM data, Public Citizen estimates that paying federal employees in the DRP not to work cost between $11.1 billion and $15.1 billion through March 2026, the last month OPM posted publicly available data.
Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/the-trump-administration-spent-at-least-11-billion-paying-federal-workers-not-to-work/
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for destroying the administrative state, all for the benefit of billionaires and corporations everywhere.
