But the initiative did not come without a cost to taxpayers. In December, the executive director of the environmental nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) claimed the Trump administration cost taxpayers an estimated $10 billion in 2025 through its deferred resignation program.
“Ironically, this unreasonably costly mass idling of civil servants was done in the name of ‘government efficiency,’” PEER executive director Timothy White wrote in a letter to Shirley Jones, the managing associate general counsel at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.