Take this simple IQ test: If you could invest $9.5 billion once and get back more than $40 billion every year, forever, would you make the investment? This is not a trick question. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or Warren Buffett) to say “yes.” In fact, it’s a no-brainer. For those of you doing the math, that’s a 400+% annual return. Sign me up!

Yet Democrats in Congress failed the test, as did The New York Times, armed with a report from the Government Accountability Office that never even attempts the second half of the math. Why?

First, the facts.

The Trump Administration has reduced the total size of the federal government by roughly 270,000 employees since the beginning of the term. That’s a nearly 10 percent reduction. There are about 2 million employees still today, leaving the federal workforce at its smallest level since the 1960s.

In most organizations, headcount reductions come through restructuring: an across-the-board layoff of some fixed percentage or shutting down particular divisions. In the private sector, few legal rules govern severance, but employees generally receive one to two weeks per year of service.

The federal government is similar and different.

By law, federal employees are entitled to one week of severance per year of employment for their first 10 years and then two weeks for every year thereafter. There are caps and a modest age bump for employees over 40, but in general the government tracks the private sector.

Where the federal government differs is in the tools available to reduce headcount.

The legacy reduction-in-force procedures that were in place when the Trump Administration took office were overly complex and made it difficult for agencies to meaningfully reduce headcount in this way. Large-scale RIFs were subject to lengthy administrative and judicial appeal procedures that included three layers of review and often took years to complete. That is why fewer than 12,000 of the headcount reductions were executed through a RIF. We at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management have since revised these rules to make the process, including appeals, more efficient and to emphasize merit as the basis for determining RIFs. The old practice prioritized tenure.

It’s also extremely difficult to reduce headcount in the federal government even for poor performance. This is a result of the myriad civil service rules that protect federal employees and a broken employee ratings system that typically rates fewer than 0.5% of all federal employees as performing at an unacceptable level. OPM is currently revising these rules to create greater accountability and engender a high-performance culture in government.

Enter Elon Musk and the DOGE team.

Given these then-existing limitations, the DOGE team designed a bespoke program called the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). As the name suggests, DRP was a voluntary resignation program offered to federal employees that provided up to eight months of severance for those who opted in. You read that correctly: eight months!

To put that in context, the average tenure of a federal employee is about 12 years. Based on the above “normal” severance laws, that individual would receive 14 weeks of pay, about 3.5 months. So, DRP offered more than twice the severance required by law. You would be hard-pressed to find a private-sector program of this scale offering terms that generous.

This is where the GAO report that The New York Times wrote about comes in.

Because of the vagaries of federal law, there was no clean way to write that check. Statutory severance is not available to employees who resign voluntarily, and the standard federal buyout has been capped at $25,000 for decades. So agencies delivered the severance through paid administrative leave.

Normally, employees would resign and then receive their severance. But, of course, the federal government is different. Instead, employees were put on paid administrative leave for up to eight months and then formally left the government. While the mechanics are different, the outcome is the same: Employees got paid without having to do any work, the very definition of “severance.” They could even take other nongovernment jobs in the meantime, and the government’s headcount fell when the period ended. Strange process, same result.

Now back to our not-so-difficult math question.

GAO estimates that agencies spent about $9.5 billion on all paid administrative leave in 2025 and attributes about $6.7 billion of that to DRP. For the sake of argument, let’s charge the entire $9.5 billion to DRP anyway. It was a one-time expense.

What did the taxpayer get for it? Using rough averages, the fully loaded cost of a federal employee is about $150,000 per year. For 270,000 employees, that is more than $40 billion in annual costs. These are not one-time costs, but costs incurred every year in perpetuity.

So, for a one-time expense of at most $9.5 billion, taxpayers save more than $40 billion each year. That’s a 400+% annual return, and the outlay paid for itself in under six months.

Reasonable minds might disagree on a lot of things: what is the “right” size of the federal government; whether reducing headcount is appropriate; whether the government should pay more in severance than the private sector; and even whether you like the way Elon and his team accomplished their goals.

What’s not arguable is that the math math’s. Even in Washington.