The Trump administration “wasted” $10bn on paid leave, or paying workers to stay home, as part of the “department of government efficiency’s” assault on the federal workforce, a new analysis by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) estimates.
In a letter sent to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Peer estimates that more than 154,000 employees were put on paid leave in 2025, making up nearly 7% of the federal civilian workforce. That costs taxpayers approximately $10bn in compensation for workers who were staying home and not working.
Peer alleges the Trump administration violated the law with extended paid leaves, but enforcement is complicated. It would require navigating a complex administrative or legal process, or a US attorney with the Donald Trump-controlled Department of Justice to pursue criminal charges.
“Spending over $10bn of taxpayer money to prevent people from working is a hell of a way to run a railroad,” said Peer senior counsel Peter Jenkins.
“Ironically, this outrageous waste of human capital – when key federal agencies such as the National Park Service were horribly understaffed – was done in the name of government efficiency.”
Among others on paid leave are US Environmental Protection Agency environmental justice employees, who are stuck in legal limbo.
There are few legal remedies in part because of the labyrinthine regulatory process that involves multiple interchanging parts across various laws and oversight bodies, and because the Trump administration has taken legally questionable steps to hamstring the response and protect its paid leave operation. That has culminated in an “accountability black hole”, said Madeline Materna, a Stanford University doctoral student in comparative science who studies the issue.
Until 2016, federal agencies sometimes used administrative leave as a way to punish employees with whom they had a problem, like whistleblowers. Some were put on involuntary leave for years without recourse.
Peer lobbied for laws to prevent this strategy, and Congress in 2016 passed the Administrative Leave Act (ALA), which limits imposition of paid leave to no more than 10 workdays in any calendar year, with very limited exceptions.
The Trump paid leave strategy seems to be a clear violation of the ALA, but the first Trump administration did not implement the ALA’s specific regulatory rules that agencies have to follow. Opposition from agencies’ management impeded implementation during Joe Biden’s administration, which also did not develop the rules until Peer sued in 2024, said Jeff Ruch, senior counsel at Peer.
The regulatory rules did not go into effect until September 2025, which complicated ALA enforcement, even if the extended paid leaves seemed to clearly violate the law.
The Trump administration carved out separate classifications of paid leave, and claimed the ALA 10-day rule only applies to what it calls “investigative” paid leave, Materna said. But the provision does not apply to the various other types of paid leave the administration has created.
The classifications “totally gut the law”, Materna said. “They did not lawfully implement Congress’s statue, they did something else.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Deficiency Act prohibits the government from spending money on employees who should not be on leave, because Congress did not appropriate the funds for purposes related to the paid leave program.
The first step to accountability lies in Peer’s complaint with the Government Accountability Office. The GAO must opine that the paid leave is a violation of the law, and agency heads who violate the rules can be criminally prosecuted, removed from office, and fined.
That, however, would require a “US attorney armed with a profile in courage because they would be prosecuting their own administration”, Ruch said. “It’s not a nonstarter, but it’s unlikely.”
Materna said criminal prosecution is also complicated because agency managers must knowingly violate the law, and they could argue that they have been following the rules that were implemented.
Peer has filed an administrative complaint before the US Office of Special Counsel. If that office finds wrongdoing, the cases could be taken before a little-known office called the Merit Systems Protection Board. It has authority to take action, but Ruch said it hears cases involving termination, demotion or suspension without pay for two weeks. It may not have jurisdiction over paid leave cases.
Notably, the Trump administration fired all Democrats on the board, which has left it without a quorum.
A federal lawsuit over the administration’s legally questionable implementation of the ALA rules is possible, but only if a plaintiff can show that they were harmed by the rules’ implementation, Materna said. A hypothetical plaintiff would have to get a favorable ruling from the Merit Systems Protection Board to have standing for a lawsuit. But the barriers to the Merit Systems Protection Board make that virtually impossible.
“There’s clever dancing around the law, and things that make it challenging to take the issue to court or any regulatory body, and that’s why [the paid leave program] has been allowed to proceed,” Materna said.
