The government is paying 154,000 people not to work

Summary

Post Reports: The Government is Paying 154,000 People Not to Work Released August 4, 2025

Hosts: Martine Powers and Elahe Izadi
Reporter: Colby Ekowitz
Contributing Reporter: Meryl Kornfield

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Introduction

In the August 4, 2025 episode of Post Reports, The Washington Post delves into a controversial federal government program that is currently paying 154,000 employees to cease working. Hosted by Colby Ekowitz, the episode features in-depth reporting by Meryl Kornfield, shedding light on the intricacies and implications of this deferred resignation initiative under the second Trump administration.

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Background: The Deferred Resignation Program

The episode begins by introducing listeners to the case of Brian Griffin (00:33), a 63-year-old Department of Agriculture inspector who dedicated nearly three decades to his role. With the onset of the second Trump administration, significant efforts were made to reduce the federal workforce. This included the introduction of a deferred resignation program, which essentially allowed employees to resign voluntarily while continuing to receive their salaries for an extended period.

Brian Griffin explains his transition:
"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." (00:37)

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Uncovering the 154,000 Figure

Meryl Kornfield reveals the groundbreaking discovery of 154,000 federal employees being paid while not actively working (03:07). This figure was uncovered through diligent investigation, including anonymous sources within the Office of Personnel Management and persistent inquiries to various federal agencies.

Meryl Kornfield states:
"This is a number that has not been previously reported... we learned in 14 agencies, 105,000 people got this buyout program." (04:35)

The report highlights that this number is likely an undercount, as it does not include employees on administrative leave or those involuntarily removed from their positions.

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Financial Implications

The financial burden of this program is substantial. While exact figures remain undisclosed, estimates suggest that the cost could reach billions of dollars. Democratic members of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations have projected that the program could cost approximately $14.8 billion, based on an estimated 200,000 workers receiving buyouts (07:14).

Meryl Kornfield comments on the financial aspect:
"With an average federal salary... they are still getting paid, they're still getting paid the same salary, same benefits accruing... except they're just not doing their work." (08:05)

Despite promises of long-term savings, current federal spending has slightly increased, contradicting the administration's claims of efficiency and cost-cutting.

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Trump Administration's Response

The Trump administration defends the program by asserting that reducing the size of the federal workforce will lead to long-term savings and increased government efficiency (08:14).

Administration's Stance:
"In the long term, they are shrinking the size of government... these workers... should have not been hired, and that this will now reduce the count of workers in the long term."

However, critics argue that these immediate costs undermine the administration's claims of fiscal responsibility.

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Criticisms of the Deferred Resignation Program

Critics label the program as poorly strategized and rushed, leading to inefficiencies and unintended consequences. The rapid reduction has resulted in vital government functions being neglected, such as food safety inspections, while employees continue to draw salaries without performing their duties.

Meryl Kornfield highlights:**
"Because these workers that were on the payroll last year are still on the payroll... they're getting paid the same salary... except they're just not doing what they, you know, things like checking to make sure if our food is safe." (11:33)

Additionally, the lack of a structured plan has forced the administration to rehire some employees, further complicating the workforce dynamics.

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Impact on Federal Workers

The program's impact on employees is mixed. Some individuals, like Brian Griffin, welcome the opportunity to retire early and pursue personal interests without the constraints of federal employment (01:55).

Brian Griffin shares his perspective:
"You certainly can't complain. It's like a weekend... I 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." (01:55)

Conversely, others experience emotional and psychological distress. Long-serving employees find their work identities disrupted, leading to feelings of depression and loss of purpose.

A Federal Employee expresses:
"For her, it doesn't feel that way. She's been doing some self care... but most of her days she says that she's depressed, that sometimes she wonders why she's getting out." (13:17)

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Future Reporting and Ongoing Investigations

Meryl Kornfield indicates ongoing efforts to quantify the total cost of the program and understand its broader implications on government operations and public services (14:43). Questions remain about the long-term effectiveness of such workforce reductions and the sustainability of paying employees who are not actively contributing.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes by emphasizing the need for transparency and comprehensive analysis of the deferred resignation program. As the Trump administration continues its push to minimize the federal workforce, the long-term consequences on government efficiency and taxpayer funds remain a critical concern.

Colby Ekowitz wraps up:
"Dial it into 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." (12:59)

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Production Credits:
Produced by Peter Bresnan, mixed by Shawn Carter, edited by Maggie Penman, with contributions from Dan Egan, Hannah Natenson, and Laura Meckler.

Support the Show: Subscribe to Post Reports at washingtonpost.com/subscribe for more in-depth analyses and reporting.

Transcript

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[Colby Ekowitz]

Brian Griffin worked for the Department of agriculture for almost 30 years.

[Brian Griffin]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

Eventually he ended up in Hawaii where he worked remotely. He's 63. He planned to retire soon, but he loved his job.

[Brian Griffin]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

Then Donald Trump came back into office. The second Trump administration has taken drastic steps to reshape and reduce the federal workforce. That 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.

[Brian Griffin]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

So for Brian, the choice was obvious. Take the money and stop working.

[Brian Griffin]

You certainly can't complain. It's like a weekend. 3, 8, 65, right? I 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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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 colbykowitz. 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. Meryl 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. Hi, Meryl. It's so good to have you.

[Meryl Kornfield]

Thanks for having me.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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.

[Meryl Kornfield]

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 DOGE 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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

And when you say doge, obviously you're talking about.

[Meryl Kornfield]

I'm talking about the U.S. department of Government Efficiency, launched by Elon Musk.

[Colby Ekowitz]

And so basically, they were trying to, like, reduce the federal workforce by giving people this incentive to quit, basically.

[Meryl Kornfield]

That's right.

[Colby Ekowitz]

And that brings us to this, like, 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?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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. These are officials from the Office of Personnel Management, which is the federal government's HR arm. And we got this from really just asking people every day for weeks what this number could be.

[Colby Ekowitz]

I mean, how difficult was it to finally uncover, like, what the actual number is?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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. And 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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

And is this. 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.

[Meryl Kornfield]

It doesn't count those people. So this is an undercount, really, of the number of people who are getting paid not to work. These are people who volunteered for 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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

So somewhere north of 154,000 is probably the people still on government payroll who are not working. Like, what percentage of the total federal workforce is that?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

Right.

[Meryl Kornfield]

But we don't know how much every person who took the buyout was getting paid.

[Colby Ekowitz]

Has anyone else tried to calculate these numbers?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

I see. But they're just kind of guessing at that number based, making the best educated guess that they can.

[Meryl Kornfield]

Exactly. And with an average federal salary.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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 reporting?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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. Because they're still paying these People.

[Meryl Kornfield]

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. The 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 in, except they're just not doing their work.

[Colby Ekowitz]

After 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. So obviously, the Trump administration's argument is saying, okay, well, we're going to eventually save money on this, that 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?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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 US Doge Service came in and slashed government very quickly. There were mistakes made. Even administration officials have acknowledged that some people were ultimately rehired. And 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, 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 this strategic way that the government has previously gone about this, they don't put people on administrative leave and then decide to fire them. They have them keep working and then fire them.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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.

[Meryl Kornfield]

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. We spoke with a former employee of the Department of Agriculture who, 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 and 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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

So there was nothing that was like, you forfeit the government salary if you get another job.

[Meryl Kornfield]

Yeah, you still get paid.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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 at 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. And 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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

Of bed because she doesn't feel like she has a purpose.

[Meryl Kornfield]

Exactly.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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? What are the things you're still trying to find out?

[Meryl Kornfield]

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.

[Colby Ekowitz]

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

[Meryl Kornfield]

Thank you.

[Colby Ekowitz]

Merrill Kornfield 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 subscribe or follow the link in our show notes. Today's show was produced by Peter Bresnan. It was mixed by Shawn Carter and edited by Maggie Penman. Thanks to Merrill's editor, Dan Egan, and to Hannah Natenson and Laura Meckler, who contributed reporting. I'm Colby Ekowitz. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from the Washington Post.

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