By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management 

August 1, 2025

This week, a Senate Democrat report took aim at OPM’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) – a voluntary retirement program that provided government employees with eight months of paid leave. Their argument? Our efforts to modernize the federal workforce somehow reflect poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you don’t have time to read the 54-page report, here’s the TLDR:

• We should never reduce government spending because we might incur one-time separation costs in doing so; and
• We should ignore the fact that in incurring those one-time costs we lower the ongoing run-rate of government spend, thus saving billions of dollars.

It’s backward logic like this that got us in our current financial dire straits – $7 trillion in annual spend (up 50% since 2019) and $36 trillion in total debt (increasing to the tune of $2 trillion per year)!

So, let me try to explain that we haven’t all lost our minds.

Why DRP? 

Simply put, our talent management system is broken. Unlike in the private sector, you can’t simply realign your workforce to meet changing needs. You have to jump through 1,000 hoops and even then, it takes years, not months. As a result, we get what the system incents – headcount numbers only ever go in one direction (and that way is not down!).

Here's a fun fact – last year, fewer than 6,000 government employees (out of a 2.4-million-person workforce) were removed from their jobs for poor performance or bad behavior – that’s 0.2%. Oh, and we have more than 1,500 lawyers across the government to review the claims that some of these individuals filed to contest their removal.

That’s not fair to the American people, and, equally important, it’s not fair to the many federal employees who come to work every day and do a great job. We designed the DRP as a practical, humane, and voluntary option to accelerate workforce transitions in a system that desperately needed movement. Employees were given the option to retire early and receive eight months of paid leave; in return, the government will save $20+ billion in costs, annually.

By the way, the DRP isn’t unusual. It mirrors what employers in the private sector across the country do every day, offer certainty and clarity to employees while restructuring in a responsible, mission-first way. What’s “unusual” is pretending government is exempt from the same pressures every other organization faces in a rapidly changing world and not understanding the simple difference between one-time severance costs and ongoing annual cost savings.

Yes, the federal government has VERA and VSIP. But those programs are stuck in the past. The dollar limits haven’t been updated in decades. They’re not meaningful tools anymore. So, this administration decided to do something better, something grounded in reality and respectful of our workforce. The DRP offered clear terms, fair treatment, and a way to move forward without dragging people through years of uncertainty.

As for costs? Much of what these Senate Democrats points to is a direct result of the legal and bureaucratic muddle we operate in. If the federal government had a modern, at-will employment framework like most employers, we wouldn’t need complex workarounds or face sky-high administrative overhead just to get things done.

At OPM we’re here to fix the decades of broken systems that have put us in this position. The Deferred Resignation Program was a necessary step toward a smarter, leaner, more effective government. If that ruffles a few feathers in Washington, so be it. The American people deserve a workforce built for performance, not permanence.