Daniel SterlingA Government Accountability Office report published September 16, 2026 found that federal agencies spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025 — a 435 percent increase from 2023 and nearly six times the pre-DOGE baseline. The figure, far exceeding initial projections, captures the financial footprint of the Department of Government Efficiency's aggressive restructuring of the federal workforce. For the more than 260,000 workers who were separated, resigned under the deferred-resignation program, or remain in legal limbo, the question has become pressing: what can they still claim?
The Numbers Behind the DOGE Restructuring
The GAO's September 2026 report is the first comprehensive government audit of DOGE-related spending on the human side of the ledger. The headline figure — $9.5 billion in salary costs for employees on paid administrative leave — breaks down in revealing detail:
- $6.7 billion (70%) tied directly to the Administration's January 2025 deferred resignation program, in which roughly 140,000 workers were offered pay through September 2025 if they resigned within nine days
- $2.8 billion in traditional paid administrative leave, up from a 2023 baseline of roughly $1.6 billion annually
- A 435% increase in administrative leave usage between 2023 and 2025, documented across federal agencies
The cuts fell unevenly across agencies. The Department of Education lost 46 percent of its workforce. The General Services Administration shed 37 percent. The Office of Personnel Management — the agency charged with overseeing federal workers' benefits and protections — shrank by 34 percent. USAID, functionally dissolved, saw a 95 percent workforce reduction between December 2024 and January 2026.
The net result: a decline of 271,363 civilian federal employees — roughly 12 percent of the entire federal workforce — between Trump's inauguration and July 2026, when DOGE formally shut down after failing to reach its $2 trillion savings target. The agency ultimately claimed $215 billion in savings, a figure the GAO itself flagged as potentially overstated due to data limitations in OPM's tracking systems.
In other words: the government may have spent $9.5 billion — possibly more — to shrink a workforce that, by its own accounting, generated only $215 billion in confirmed savings. The math has attracted Congressional attention, and with it, renewed scrutiny of whether the separations themselves were legally clean.
Why Tens of Thousands of Workers Still Have Open Legal Questions
The DOGE process moved faster than federal employment law anticipated. Multiple procedural vulnerabilities are now emerging in MSPB hearings and federal court filings across the country.
Probationary workers — those with fewer than one year of service — were terminated en masse in early 2025, with agencies citing generalized "performance" rationales. The Merit Systems Protection Board subsequently found those rationales insufficiently specific for hundreds of appellants, a pattern that employment attorneys say likely reflects a much larger population of similarly situated workers.
Deferred resignation takers signed agreements under severe time pressure — a nine-day window, presented by email — without independent legal counsel, raising questions about whether those agreements were fully informed and voluntarily executed. Courts examining analogous federal employment waivers have allowed challenges when the window for decision was compressed to a degree that effectively precluded consultation.
Schedule F reclassifications, authorized under Executive Order 14171, stripped civil service protections from thousands of employees in "policy-influencing" positions. The definition of that category was applied inconsistently across agencies, and workers who were reclassified without proper notice may have grounds to challenge the reclassification itself — separate from any challenge to a subsequent termination.
The MSPB became a bottleneck. Filings surged in early 2025, then again in mid-2026 as cases that had been held in procedural limbo began reaching the docket. As of September 2026, attorneys specializing in federal employment law report median wait times exceeding 18 months for a board-level decision — meaning that workers who filed promptly are only now beginning to receive rulings.
What Legal Protections Remain in Force
Despite the sweeping nature of the restructuring, several statutory protections were never legislatively repealed and remain available to eligible workers.
Chapter 75 rights (5 U.S.C. §§ 7501–7543) remain in force for career employees not reclassified under Schedule F. These require that a removal be for cause, that the employee receive advance written notice of the charges, and that the employee have a meaningful opportunity to respond before a final decision. Agencies that bypassed these procedural steps — and internal agency documentation filed in recent MSPB cases suggests that some did — created appealable adverse actions.
Whistleblower protections under 5 U.S.C. § 2302 bar agencies from taking, threatening, or failing to take a personnel action because an employee made a protected disclosure. DOGE-era disclosures about government data access, contract irregularities, or cybersecurity vulnerabilities may qualify as protected. An attorney can evaluate whether a disclosure meets the statutory threshold.
EEO rights under Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Rehabilitation Act remain available. Workers whose agencies reduced headcount in ways that disproportionately affected employees over 40, or those with disabilities, may have an ADEA or Rehabilitation Act claim worth evaluating — even if the worker also accepted a voluntary separation incentive.
Key deadlines to know:
- MSPB appeals: 30 days from the effective date of the adverse action
- EEOC initial counselor contact: 45 days from the triggering event
- OSC whistleblower complaints: generally two years from the date the employee knew or should have known of the retaliation
Some of these clocks have already run for workers separated in 2025. But for workers who faced actions in 2026, or whose deadlines were tolled by pending agency-level proceedings, time may still remain.
A Concrete Case: The GS-11 Analyst Who Took the Deal
Consider this scenario, drawn from the profile of thousands of workers who accepted deferred resignation: a GS-11 federal analyst at the Department of Education, with seven years of federal service and a current step-5 salary of approximately $84,000 per year. She received the deferred resignation email on January 28, 2025 and signed within the nine-day window, securing paid leave through September 30, 2025 — roughly $56,000 in deferred compensation before taxes.
Three months before receiving the email, her supervisor had rated her performance as "outstanding" on her most recent evaluation. In late 2024, she had filed a disclosure through official channels with her agency's Inspector General, reporting that a third-party contractor was improperly accessing personally identifiable information in a federal database.
If she consults a federal employment attorney today, the attorney would evaluate at least three independent theories:
1. Whistleblower retaliation. If the IG disclosure was a contributing factor — even a secondary one — in the circumstances under which she was offered the deferred resignation, she may have a claim under the Whistleblower Protection Act. Critically, signing a deferred resignation agreement does not automatically extinguish statutory anti-retaliation rights. Courts have held that a "voluntary" separation made in response to retaliatory pressure is not truly voluntary for purposes of WPA waiver analysis.
2. Validity of the waiver. A nine-day window with no requirement for independent legal advice before waiving civil service protections is a fact pattern that employment attorneys can argue was procedurally inadequate. The question is not whether it was legally insufficient on its face — it may not have been — but whether the specific circumstances surrounding her individual offer support a challenge.
3. ADEA or EEO exposure. If her division's reduction disproportionately affected workers over 40 or employees in a particular demographic group, a statistical pattern claim may survive even without a targeted "I was fired because I'm [X]" allegation.
Her EEOC counselor contact window may still be open if she has had any contact with the agency since her formal separation, a nuance that turns on the specifics of her case. An attorney consultation of one to two hours could determine whether any clock is still running in her favor — at a cost far lower than the claims she might otherwise leave on the table.
What Former Federal Workers Should Do Right Now
The September 2026 GAO report makes one thing clear: the DOGE workforce restructuring was not procedurally uniform, and legal residue remains across a significant number of separations. Workers who were affected through any mechanism — outright termination, deferred resignation, early retirement under pressure, or Schedule F reclassification — should take three concrete steps.
First, establish your employment status at the time of separation. The distinction between career employee (1+ year qualifying service), probationary employee, and Schedule F reclassified employee determines which legal avenue is open. The wrong path wastes time on deadlines that have already lapsed.
Second, document any potential whistleblower or EEO nexus. Gather performance evaluations, any protected disclosures you made, communications from supervisors that preceded your separation, and demographic data about your unit's reduction if available. The pattern matters as much as the individual facts.
Third, consult before concluding that the deadline has passed. Tolling doctrines, pending agency proceedings, and continuing-violation theories can extend windows that appear closed on a calendar. Federal employment attorneys routinely identify viable claims in situations that workers had already written off.
The Government Accountability Office's federal workforce resources document what happened at the system level. What no government report can do is evaluate whether a specific worker's individual separation holds an actionable claim. ExpertZoom connects former federal employees with attorneys experienced in federal employment law and MSPB proceedings who can conduct that individualized analysis.
YMYL disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Federal employment claims involve strict filing deadlines and complex procedural requirements. Consult a qualified federal employment attorney before initiating any legal action or assuming a deadline has passed.
