The government is paying 154,000 people not to work

0:01Brian Griffin worked for the Department of Agriculture for almost 30 years. When I first started, I was an inspector for orange juice in the state of Florida, and it evolved over the years. I moved around to other locations and inspected different commodities. Eventually, he ended up in Hawaii, where he worked remotely. He's 63. He planned to retire soon, but he loved his job. It was a lot of fun. It was interesting. There was a good group of people that we were with. So yeah, it was a good job. Then Donald Trump came back into office. The second Trump administration has taken drastic steps to reshape and reduce the federal workforce.

0:40That has included offering millions of government employees a deferred resignation, basically letting them resign but keep getting paid. Brian heard the administration was threatening to move remote workers like him back to the office. And to get to an office for his specific sub-agency, that was not going to be convenient. The closest office to where I'm located is in California. It was just all the unknowns and the stress of that and the stress of everybody you work with is under that same cloud of unknown things that are going to happen to them. So for Brian, the choice was obvious. Take the money and stop working.

1:24You certainly can't complain. It's like a weekend 365, right? I'd do your typical retired stuff, put it around the house, yard work, things like that. It's a perfect environment out here for that, so no problem. Brian has now been on leave since May, still drawing on his$132 ,000 a year salary till the end of September. And Brian is just one of thousands of people who the government is paying to not work. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Colby Echowitz. It's Monday, August 4th. Today we hear from my colleague Meryl Kornfield. She's been reporting on the fallout of the federal government's downsizing.

2:08Meryl walks us through the Post reporting on just how many people are being paid by the taxpayers to stop working. and how this fits into the Trump administration's goal to make the government smaller.

2:22Hi, Meryl. It's so good to have you. Thanks for having me. So, Meryl, I'm hoping we can start by having you remind us a little bit about this deferred resignation program and why the Trump administration even implemented it in the first place. So very early on in the Trump administration in January, email went out to federal workers offering them what was called a fork in the road. And that was an offer to leave government. There was this threat of mass firings and DOJ was cutting agencies. And a lot of people started to consider taking this offer, which would basically allow them to continue to receive pay for another eight months while not working.

3:04And when you say DOJ, obviously you're talking about... I'm talking about the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency launched by Elon Musk. And so basically they were trying to reduce the federal workforce by giving people this incentive to quit, basically. That's right. And that brings us to this bombshell number in your reporting. You've reported that 154 ,000 people are currently being paid by the government to not work. How did you guys uncover that number? This is a number that has not been previously reported. We heard this from two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share this with us.

3:47These are officials from the Office of Personnel Management, which is the federal government's HR arm. And we got this from, you know, really just asking people every day for weeks what this number could be. I mean, how difficult was it to finally uncover what the actual number is? Very hard. Yeah. We've been working on it for weeks. We had reached out to every agency to ask them about their staffing numbers, not just about the number of people who took buyouts, but the number of people who were fired, how many people are left at those agencies. We just wanted to better understand the scope of staffing in the federal government because those numbers weren't readily available.

4:30And what we found was two dozen agencies didn't respond to us or decline to. But 11 agencies did give us numbers and another three we got numbers through other sources. And we learned in 14 agencies, 105 ,000 people got this buyout program. So that gave us an early look of what the total number could be. But we didn't really know the whole number until we just got it. And is this$154 ,000, does that also account for people that involuntarily were taken out of their jobs, like people at USAID? Like, are they still collecting paychecks, even though USAID isn't maybe doing that work right now? It doesn't count those people.

5:19So this is an undercount, really, of the number of people who are getting paid not to work. These are people who volunteered through this specific buyout program that was the largest program that was used to have people leave government. But there, as you point out, there are agencies like the Global Media Agency, the Department of Education, CFPB, that have been caught up in litigation for months on end. And those workers that the government was trying to fire are on paid administrative leave. And they are not counted in this tally. So somewhere north of 154 ,000 is probably the people still on government payroll who are not working.

5:59Like what percentage of the total federal workforce is that? The number of people who took the voluntary buyout amounts to about 6.7 % of the government's civilian workforce, which is 2.3 million people. So what does this all mean in terms of like dollars? Do we know like how much taxpayer money is being spent in this way? We don't exactly know the number, and we've asked officials that have not been able to share the number. We could do some back-of-the-envelope math to multiply this number by the average salary of federal workers, and that would be billions. Right. But we don't know how much every person who took the buyout was getting paid.

6:48Has anyone else tried to calculate these numbers? Different groups have attempted to calculate it. Most recently, Democrats from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations came out with their own estimate. And they believe that the government has spent billions of dollars paying workers either through the voluntary departure program or through involuntary administrative leave. and they total the number of workers potentially as 200 ,000 workers who took the buyout. They estimate that would have cost the government$14.8 billion. I see. But they're just kind of guessing at that number based, making the best educated guess that they can.

7:30Exactly. And with an average federal salary. So now that you have reported out an actual number, you've got this$154 ,000, How has the Trump administration responded to the Post's reporting? The Trump administration has argued that in the long term, they are shrinking the size of government. They have long argued that agencies are too bloated. There was too many federal employees hired over recent years that should have not been hired. And that this will now reduce the count of workers in the long term. So the idea being, in the future, it will be a money saver for the American people. I mean, it obviously can't have saved money yet, right?

8:16Because they're still paying these people. Exactly. There is a federal spending tracker that the Wharton School does that I have as a bookmark on my computer, and I am constantly refreshing it and looking at how much the federal government is spending every day. and it's actually slightly above what the government was spending last year. So amid all of this rhetoric about cost-cutting and efficiency, the government's spending more money right now and it's spending more money on federal salaries too.

8:51The fact is because these workers that were on the payroll last year are still on the payroll, they're still getting paid the same salary, same benefits, accruing the same vacation they would be, except they're just not doing their work.

9:10After the break, we hear about some of the workers who are struggling with being out of a job, even if they're still getting paid. We'll be right back.

9:32So, obviously, the Trump administration's argument is saying, okay, well, we're going to eventually save money on this. You're not going to see it this year, but you're going to see it in future years once we stop paying these employees. But what do critics of the deferred resignation program say? Critics of this administration's effort to cut government the way that they did say that this was not a strategic, well-developed plan. Essentially, Elon Musk and the U.S. Doge service came in and slashed government very quickly. There were mistakes made. Even administration officials have acknowledged that some people were ultimately rehired.

10:20And now, because it's happened so quickly and they've exited so many people, what is left is there are a lot of people who were doing, you know, what critics say were very important tasks. And now they're not doing those tasks. They're still getting paid, but they're not doing what they, you know, things like checking to make sure if our food is safe. And these people are getting paid, which is, you know, what critics say, this is not efficient. They should be doing these jobs. and still get their salary, rather than getting their salary and not doing it. They also say, another criticism, is that in part of the strategic way that the government has previously gone about this, they don't put people on administrative leave and then decide to fire them.

11:05They have them keep working and then fire them. You and our other colleagues, you've spoken to a lot of people who accepted this deferred resignation offer. Most of them spoke anonymously to protect themselves from any retaliation from the Trump administration. What have you heard from those people? You know, we heard from Brian Griffin at the top of the show. You know, some people seem pretty happy to be collecting a paycheck and not have to report to work. Some people have been happy about it, and they have taken the time to pursue their hobbies, apply for other jobs. And, you know, some people have benefited from that.

11:43We spoke with a former employee of the Department of Agriculture who, at first, he was upset. He was sleeping through the first few days of his paid leave. He started to, you know, waste his time with watching improv comedy or crafters on YouTube and Dungeons & Dragons games. And then eventually, as he started to figure out what to do next, he got a new, even higher paying job. And he realized that he was actually in a more fortunate position because now he'll be getting a new salary. His wife can take some time off and he's enjoying life all while the government is still paying him. Wow. So there was nothing that was like you forfeit the government salary if you get another job.

12:33Yeah, you still get paid. You still get paid. What about people at the other end of the spectrum? Are there people who accepted the offer and are still getting paid but are feeling down about it? I talk to a lot of federal workers every day. And many people who get into government public service work do it because they love the job. It's not a better salary than a private sector job most often. So these are people who are really passionate about what their mission is. their agency. And it's been a shock to their system to not get to do that work. We talked with another woman for this piece who has been at the Department of Education essentially for her entire career for nearly 30 years.

13:22And she felt like her work was her identity. And she's upset. And she said, you know, I understand that people will say, you know, what are you crying about? You're getting paid. But for her, it doesn't feel that way. She's been doing some self-care, going to the gym. But most of her days, she says that she's depressed, that sometimes she wonders why she's getting out of bed. Because she doesn't feel like she has a purpose. Exactly. So you're doing all this incredible reporting. What are the questions that you still have about the deferred resignation program and the way that the federal workforce has been slashed?

14:09What are the things you're still trying to find out? I definitely want to know how much this has cost in total, what the government has spent in the amount that it's paid people not to work. And not just on the people who took the buyouts, but also the people in the limbo of involuntary administrative leave. And I also wonder what impacts these people not working will have. From so many stories, I hear the work that they were doing served the public in so many different ways. But there are so many different functions that the government's not really doing anymore.

14:54Well, Meryl, thank you so much. I appreciate you coming on and talking about your reporting. Thank you.

15:03Meryl Cornfield reports on the federal government for The Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. If you want to show your support for the show, please subscribe to The Washington Post. You can go to WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe or follow the link in our show notes. Today's show was produced by Peter Bresnan. It was mixed by Sean Carter and edited by Maggie Penman. Thanks to Merrill's editor, Dan Egan, and to Hannah Naitanson and Laura Meckler, who contributed reporting. I'm Colby Echowitz. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.

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