Asger Risom
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency spent $6.7 billion paying federal employees to sit at home, triggering a massive loss of institutional knowledge that agencies are now frantically trying to replace.
When Elon Musk and the Trump administration launched the Department of Government Efficiency, the stated goal was to bring ruthless, Silicon Valley-style cost-cutting to the bloated federal bureaucracy. The underlying premise was that government is wildly inefficient, and a team of billionaire outsiders could immediately slash wasteful spending.
Instead, the single largest workforce reduction in federal history has morphed into an incredibly expensive vanity project. In a desperate bid to convince government employees to leave their posts, DOGE accidentally triggered one of the most massive taxpayer-funded vacations ever recorded, and the resulting brain drain is already causing critical infrastructure to fracture.
The ultimate severance package
The sheer scale of the financial miscalculation is staggering. According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office detailed by Fortune, the federal government’s use of paid administrative leave exploded by 435 percent between 2023 and 2025. Federal agencies spent $9.5 billion paying employees to stay off the clock.
Of that total, the GAO attributed a massive $6.7 billion directly to DOGE’s “deferred resignation program.”
The math here is brutally simple. Back in February 2025, DOGE sent a notorious “Fork in the Road” email to two million federal workers. To artificially force the workforce numbers down, the administration offered an incredibly sweet deal: agree to resign, and you can keep collecting your full taxpayer-funded salary and benefits through the end of September while doing absolutely zero work. Roughly 140,000 employees took the deal. As the Washington Examiner notes, they were effectively paid for eight months to sit on the couch.
The Office of Personnel Management is desperately trying to spin this as a financial victory. OPM Director Scott Kupor claims the $9.5 billion hit is merely a one-time expense that will yield $40 billion in annual savings going forward, framing it as a 400 percent return on investment. But that corporate accounting logic completely ignores what actually happens when you arbitrarily fire a massive chunk of your workforce without a transition plan.
A highly expensive brain drain
You cannot gut the federal workforce by 12 percent overnight without breaking core societal functions. The government is already backpedaling.
According to a recent report by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, federal agencies are already scrambling to backfill more than 20,000 roles left vacant by the DOGE resignation push. But because they pushed out the highly experienced veterans, agencies are forced to hire rookies who lack critical institutional knowledge. The replacements are coming in at significantly lower pay grades across the board—a disparity that is heavily pronounced in specialized fields. For example, new criminal investigators at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are coming in an average of 6.1 general schedule grades lower than the veterans who were paid to walk out the door.
We are already seeing the real-world consequences of this ideological purge. The Partnership for Public Service noted that the USDA is actively trying to fill consumer safety inspector roles that were left vacant by the deferred resignation program. In the intervening months, consumer complaints about meat and egg products spiked 40 percent, and public health experts have linked recent cyclospora outbreaks directly to DOGE-mandated cuts to foreign inspection personnel.
Slashing payroll numbers looks fantastic on a spreadsheet. But paying billions of dollars to force out your most experienced workers, only to immediately hire underqualified replacements while the domestic food supply suffers, is the exact opposite of government efficiency.
