Public Citizen, a nonpartisan public-interest organization, reviewed the cost of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn cost-cutting techniques. Public Citizen found that at least $11 billion was wasted by hasty firing of civil servants, most of whom were paid for not working and many of whom were rehired because they were needed.

Douglas S. Pasternak wrote:

The Trump administration has paid federal employees at least $11 billion – and likely much more – not to work.

This 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,[1] and it does not look at other federal efforts to reduce the number of federal workers.[2]

Nor does the total include the enormous social cost of leaving major government functions unfulfilled.

A Devastated Workforce

Since Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the federal workforce has declined by 278,282 individuals and 139,628 of those federal employees took part in the administration’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP).[3]

The Deferred Resignation Program was initiated on January 28, 2025, with what came to be known as the “Fork in the Road” email, and those that participated were paid but exempted from work through September 30, 2025.[4] However, if you were eligible to retire by December 31, 2025, you could remain in the program and continue to get paid from October 1, 2025 until December 31, 2025, when you needed to separate from federal service.[5] 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. The variables and assumptions Public Citizen made in estimating the range of costs due to the Deferred Resignation Program are detailed in our methodology section and two charts included at the end of this report.[6]

To put the cost spent on requiring federal employees to stay home and not to work prior to separating from federal service into perspective, the chart below shows several examples of what $11.1 billion could have been used to purchase, rather than paying employees not to work.

Table 1: What $11.1 Billion Could Purchase

ACTIVITY UNIT COST: WHAT $11.1 BILLION COULD PURCHASE

School Breakfasts

$1.91 per breakfast

5.8 billion school breakfasts

School Lunches

$3.08 per lunch

3.6 billion school lunches

Annual Daycare (full year, per child)

$13,262 per child per year

A full year of daycare for more than 837,000 children

Infant Childcare (monthly)

$1,233 per month

9 million months of infant childcare

Annual Family Health Care Premiums

$26,056 per family per year

Premium annual health care payments for 426,000 families

Annual Individual Health Care Premiums

$9,250 per individual per year

Premium annual health care payments for 1.2 million individuals

Public School Teacher (annual salary)

$74,496 average annual salary

Annual salary for more than 149,000 public school teachers

Annual Apartment Rent

$23,989 per year ($1,999/month)

Annual rent for 462,500 apartments

Annual In-State College Tuition (public 4-year university)

$11,960 per year

Annual in-state tuition for more than 928,000 students

Public Citizen’s analysis of OPM data concluded:

  • The Trump administration paid nearly 140,000 federal employees who took part in the Deferred Resignation Program at least $11 billion to stop working for the American public and to stay home or take vacation until they separated from federal service.[16]
  • More than 106,000 federal employees separated from federal service in September 2025 under the Deferred Resignation Program, and an additional 24,000 employees in the DRP left federal service by the end of December 2025.[17]
  • As a result of the DRP, the Department of Defense lost more than 48,000 civilian employees last year, the Department of Treasury lost 23,000 federal employees, and the Department of Agriculture more than 14,500 employees.[18]
  • Several federal court cases ruled that some of the Trump administration’s layoffs were illegal and demanded that terminated employees at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Interior, Labor, and other agencies return to work. However, there are a multitude of ongoing court cases and some of those initial court decisions have been overruled in federal appeals courts.[19]
  • At least 10 federal agencies were forced to rehire employees that had chosen to take part in the Deferred Resignation Program because they realized these employees were essential to the agency’s Congressionally mandated work on behalf of all Americans.

The costs of paying federal workers not to work will continue to rise. Since the beginning of 2026, several agencies have offered new rounds of the Deferred Resignation Program permitting federal employees to stop working, but to stay on the federal payroll through September 2026, adding even more to the burgeoning financial cost of this billion-dollar resignation program.

Although the DRP was supposed to officially conclude in the first half of FY2026 (April 2026), the Department of Interior, for instance, recently extended its program offering federal employees who stopped working by April 29, 2026, to be placed on paid administrative leave through September 2026.[20] Those costs are not included in Public Citizen’s calculations because the data is not yet available from OPM.

Other agencies and federal departments are also following suit and beginning a new round of staff cuts under the Deferred Resignation Program. The Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, which has already shed half of its workforce since last year now intends to offer more employees the chance to enroll in the DRP beginning in mid-May 2026 and remain on paid leave through September 2026 before departing the agency, according to a report in Government Executive.[21] In February 2026, the U.S. Agency for Global Media also offered its staff a similar offer as long as employees accepted the termination offer by March 9, 2026.[22]

The costs of this exercise in downsizing continue to mount, and are replete with examples of poor planning, mismanagement, and financial inefficiencies and waste. The total costs of these terminations also include more than simply paying workers to stop working, they have had ripple effects throughout the government and on the American public.

Fired, Rehired, and Just Plain Bungled

Nothing about the Trump administration’s mass layoffs has advanced “efficiency.”

In many cases, the Trump administration rescinded the terminations and resignations of federal employees in the DRP and other programs in what appears to be systemic incompetence because the administration did not seem to understand the value or critical role of these employees in keeping the departments and offices they had worked for running. The Department of Labor,[23] Internal Revenue Service (IRS),[24] Food and Drug Administration (FDA),[25] Department of Agriculture,[26] the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS),[27] Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),[28] Defense Information Services Agency (DISA),[29] the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),[30] the General Services Administration (GSA),[31] and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH),[32] all rehired workers who had been terminated or resigned after the agencies realized their critical missteps in arbitrarily dismissing tens of thousands of essential federal employees, after OPM told federal workers that if they took part in the Deferred Resignation Program they could stay home, relax, or travel to their “dream destination” while receiving their federal salaries and benefits.[33]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has conducted several analyses focused on the Department of Education, General Services Administration, and Internal Revenue Service related to the administration’s mass firings and resignations, including the Deferred Resignation Program, that clearly shows the process was neither strategic, smart, nor financially efficient.[34]