Federal Employees Were Paid $9.5 Billion Not to Work in 2025…..

Elon Musk’s DOGE brain fart ……

And Trump signed off on it….

We the US tax payer PAID Federal Employee’s NOT TO WORK….

NOT the Trump Admin….They Dion’t pay a damn thing

American TAXPAYER Money….

Who got SCREWED, eh?

Oh?

And Trump’s people have had to scramble to RE-HIRE essential people that had left….

The Trump administration paid federal employees $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, part of the president’s plan to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy and government spending, according to a new estimate from a congressional watchdog.

The Department of Government Efficiency’s program to shrink the federal work force through deferred resignations increased the use of paid administrative leave by 435 percent during the first year of President Trump’s second term, the Government Accountability Office said in a report on Tuesday. That represents a sixfold increase since 2023.

Drastically reducing the size of the federal work force was part of a broader Trump administration plan to rein in what it called frivolous and wasteful federal spending, with an initial promise of $1 trillion in savings.

The administration has said its efforts have led to more than $200 billion in savings, a figure that outside experts have not independently confirmed. In addition, the federal deficit has increased since Mr. Trump returned to office, in part because of the war in Iran and the sweeping tax cuts that Republicans enacted in 2025…..

…

“Trump spent billions to push out experienced and badly needed experts across government — this was the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Hasty efforts to achieve Mr. Trump’s downsizing mandates led some agencies to rescind deferred resignation offers or hire people to replace employees who left. The Partnership for Public Service, which advocates a more effective federal work force, found that the federal government has backfilled more than 20,000 positions left vacant because of deferred resignations.

Since the downsizing, the federal government has initiated recruiting efforts to hire employees, including lawyers and tech workers, after so many departures in 2025. There has also been an emphasis in hiring more early-career employees…..

More….