The Department of Government Efficiency formally shut down on July 4, as directed by the executive order that created it. The DOGE website records $215 billion in claimed savings from asset sales, contract cancellations, grant terminations, fraud elimination, and workforce reductions, against a stated target of $2 trillion.
The Government Accountability Office reported in September that federal agencies paid employees $9.5 billion in paid administrative leave in 2025, a 435 percent increase from 2023, at a cost six times what the government spent two years earlier. Of the $9.5 billion, $6.7 billion was associated with the deferred resignation program, which allowed employees to receive full pay and benefits until they separated by September 30, 2025.
The workforce numbers
Data from twenty-two major federal agencies shows that nearly 378,000 employees separated during 2025. About 127,000 were hired, including temporary employees, producing a net decline of approximately 256,000 across the agencies — more than 11 percent of the workforce measured from December 2024 to January 2026. The Office of Personnel Management puts the total decline, including subsequent separations, at more than 272,000.
The reductions were not evenly distributed. The immigration enforcement that simultaneously removed workers from the private economy operated on a parallel track, compressing labor supply in construction, agriculture, and healthcare at the same moment that the federal workforce was being reduced. The Department of Homeland Security lost approximately 1 percent of its workforce. The Department of Education lost more than 45 percent. Eighteen of twenty-two agencies tracked by GAO had declines exceeding 10 percent. Multiple agencies had declines above 30 percent. The pattern reflects targeting by policy function rather than efficiency analysis.
Courts reversed some of the reductions. The United States Institute of Peace was fired, rehired by court order, and fired again. Hundreds of employees terminated in the fall were subsequently rehired. The litigation created a category of employees who were terminated, restored, and re-terminated, generating legal costs alongside the administrative leave costs.
What was saved and what was not
The $215 billion claimed includes categories that are methodologically difficult to verify, including regulatory savings, programmatic changes, and interest savings. Independent analyses have found the verifiable savings figure considerably lower than claimed, concentrated in contract and grant cancellations that reduce government activity rather than eliminate waste from existing activity.
The capability question is distinct from the cost question. An agency that loses 45 percent of its workforce in twelve months does not emerge leaner. It emerges with gaps in institutional knowledge, reduced capacity to supervise the contractors that replaced civil servants in prior decades, and degraded ability to execute the statutory functions it retains. Whether those losses are worth the savings achieved depends on a calculation that neither DOGE nor its critics has made with full information. The federal interest bill of $1.36 trillion sets the scale of the fiscal problem the savings were supposed to address: $215 billion claimed against a debt service cost that runs at $3.73 billion per day.
Topics nationalfederal governmentworkforcefiscal policy
