{"id":65489,"date":"2026-09-20T13:32:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T17:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=65489"},"modified":"2026-09-20T13:32:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T17:32:25","slug":"avoiding-the-rest-of-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=65489","title":{"rendered":"Avoiding The Rest Of The Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, PJ Media<\/a> posted an article about a Government Accountability Office report that is totally misleading.<\/p>\n

The article reports:<\/p>\n

Washington has discovered a government program that costs billions of dollars, and naturally, everyone is shocked.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Government Accountability Office says federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025. Roughly $6.7 billion of that was tied to the Trump administration’s Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed workers who agreed to leave government to remain on salary while generally no longer working.<\/strong><\/p>\n

…There’s just one problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The $6.7 billion figure is an estimated one-time cost of removing workers from the federal payroll. OPM (Office of Personnel Management<\/span>) Director Scott Kupor has said the Deferred Resignation Program is expected to save more than $20 billion every year<\/a> because those salaries disappear after the employees leave.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Spend $6.7 billion once to reduce annual spending by more than $20 billion, and suddenly the story sounds rather different.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Except that, Washington being Washington, there’s another concern.<\/strong><\/p>\n

GAO says OPM can’t accurately determine the program’s actual net savings because it never established a separate payroll category to track administrative leave used for workforce reductions. Administrative leave for the resignation program was mixed together with other forms of administrative leave in the federal payroll system.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The article concludes:<\/p>\n

OPM’s more-than-$20-billion annual savings figure remains the administration’s projection. GAO isn’t endorsing it. GAO also isn’t saying the Deferred Resignation Program lost taxpayers $6.7 billion<\/a> on balance. Its report says something more inconvenient: the federal government doesn’t yet have the data necessary to accurately calculate the answer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And somehow, “Government Accounting Is Too Messy to Know the Final Number Yet” didn’t make many headlines.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The $6.7 billion is real enough to deserve scrutiny.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So is the part people keep leaving out.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It will be interesting to see exactly how much the annual deficit is when the government closes its books at at the end of September. We won’t actually see all of the Department of Government Efficiency Agency (DOGE) cuts, but between some of the cuts and the increased revenue due to the tax cuts (yes, tax cuts result in increased revenue), it will be interesting to see what the deficit for the past year actually is.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, PJ Media posted an article about a Government Accountability Office report that is totally misleading. The article reports: Washington has discovered a government program that costs billions of dollars, and naturally, everyone is shocked. The Government Accountability Office … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8462,20174,20175,17390,20176,18413,5277],"class_list":["post-65489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-administrative-leave","tag-april-2025-government-accountability-office-gao","tag-deferred-resignation-program","tag-department-of-government-efficiency-doge","tag-office-of-personnel-management-opm","tag-office-of-personnel-management-opm-director-scott-kupor","tag-pj-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65490,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65489\/revisions\/65490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}