'Buyouts': Trump’s mass layoffs are costing taxpayers a fortune — here’s why

31 July

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks to members of the media on board Air Force One en route from Scotland, Britain, to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., July 29, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Before Donald Trump and Elon Musk had a bitter falling out over Trump's "big, beautiful bill," the president praised Musk's work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a huge saving for taxpayers. The Trump Administration, with DOGE's help, aggressively downsized a wide range of federal government agencies — from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

One of the tools that the Trump Administration and DOGE used in their mass layoffs of federal workers was buyouts, which, according to reporting in the Washington Post, aren't saving money for U.S. taxpayers, but rather, are costing them a fortune.

In an article published on July 31, Post journalists Meryl Kornfield, Hannah Natanson and Laura Meckler report that according to two insiders, the federal government "is paying more than 154,000 federal employees not to work as part of the Trump Administration's deferred resignation program."

"The number, which has not been previously reported, accounts for workers at dozens of agencies who took offers from the government as of June to get paid through September 30 — the end of the fiscal year — or the end of 2025 and then voluntarily leave government, significantly reducing the size of several major agencies, according to two Office of Personnel Management officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the (Trump) Administration's plans to scale down government," the Post reporters explain. "The buyouts have rapidly sped up the process of slashing the federal workforce at an unprecedented rate, the officials said. But critics have argued the administration's tactics of using buyouts and administrative leave have been wasteful because the public is paying tens of thousands of employees not to work for months."

The "resignations," according to Kornfield, Natanson and Meckler, "amount to about 6.7 percent of the government's civilian workforce of 2.3 million people."

"Many federal workers who took voluntary exits are still getting paid," the Post journalists note. "The (Trump) Administration's reliance on paid leave and buyouts to trim payrolls is highly unusual, especially because of the costs associated with these methods, experts say."

Employment attorney Michelle Bercovici told the Post, "It's ridiculous. I've never seen anything like it. It seems so wasteful.”

Similarly, Cristin Dorgelo, who served as a senior adviser for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under former President Joe Biden, told the Post, "It's sort of hard to overstate how inappropriate and unprecedented this is."

Research from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), according to the Post reporters, says that the "race to slim government this spring led to mistakes and waste, estimating that the whole enterprise cost the government $21.7 billion."

Blumenthal told the Post, "At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of 'efficiency' and 'savings,' they have enabled DOGE's reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars. As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money. I urge inspectors general to take up our investigation’s findings and initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE's careless actions."

Read the full Washington Post article at this link (subscription required).

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