Terry Gerton You’ve got a new report out that puts the price tag of the Deferred Resignation Program, at least $11 billion. Before we dig into the details, just a quick refresher, what is or was the DRP?

Doug Pasternak The Deferred Resignation Program was one of several programs that Trump administration set up to try to push out federal workers or fire them. The Deferred Resignation Program specifically allowed workers to sign on at critical points starting last year. But it forced them to stay at home, not to work, even though many of them wanted to work during this time frame. And our analysis from OPM’s own data shows that the program so far has cost between $11 billion and $15 billion for the U.S. Government.

Terry Gerton Walk us through what you’re actually measuring here. Is this salaries, salaries and benefits, other sorts of packages that go into that 11 to 15 billion?

Doug Pasternak Yeah, I don’t want to get too far down into the weeds, but what we did is we looked at salaries plus benefits. So our analysis, the $15 billion dollar estimate at the high end includes a 38% factor for benefits, which is the usual number that private industry uses as well. And one thing that’s really important, this program is still going on. There are still agencies that are engaged in the Deferred Resignation Program as of just a couple of months ago where they’re re-offering this to individuals to let them go and one of the key points of our report was it’s not just the money. This has impacted people in various walks of life across the country. Doesn’t matter if you’re in a blue state or red state, Democrat, Republican, so many people have been impacted. It’s impacted people getting Social Security checks. It’s impacting people going to VA clinics to get medical care. And It’s been so ineffective, and we can talk about this, but I believe the proof is in the pudding, as they say. And from our analysis, there are at least 10 agencies, I believe, the number may be up to 12 now, that have rehired workers that they pushed into this program. There’s been analysis from the Government Accountability Office showing that this was neither strategic, nor smart nor well thought out. So, that’s really the crux of what our analysis did. It’s a lot of money, it’s ineffective and the costs keep mounting.

Terry Gerton All right, that’s a really helpful lay down of the different pieces of this. Let’s dig into each of them in order. The first just being the Trump administration came in and said the government is too big. We want fewer people working for us. Corporate organizations do this all the time. They pay severance to people that they want to leave in the course of a restructuring. How was what happened here in DRP just from a force sizing perspective different from that corporate model?

Doug Pasternak Sure. So first, I’m not an expert on corporate models on this front, but just very basically, the program was a resignation program. So it allowed people the opportunity to resign from public service. But a lot of people jumped into this because they were scared they were going to get fired. And a lot these individuals had worked for the federal government for decades. They wanted to keep working. Their programs were cut very quickly or they were taken out of their programs. And even if they were put on the Deferred Resignation Program, they were essentially told, great, we’ll pay you for six months or nine months. Some of it was shorter time periods. But they’re also forbidden from going back to work, from even finishing up the programs they were in, so there would be a smooth transition. So that may happen in the corporate world where people get severance packages and that sort of thing. But in the corporate world, I think if the CEO started cutting staff randomly, without any forethought to this, without any strategic plan, the shareholders of that company would be outraged. And again, what the analysis shows is there have been problems in almost every one of these cuts, and in, for instance, you know, just recently the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, really critical smaller agency in the government, helps defend against cyber security for both the government as well as private sector. They cut about a thousand employees last year, and just two months ago, they started very quickly trying to rehire more than 300 individuals because they realized they cut them from ‘mission critical’ positions. So that’s just one of many examples where it shows there was no strategic method to this. And even the GAO has done several analyzes on several programs, and they essentially found the same thing. One of the GAO’s reports, when they were looking at IRS cuts, they said, quote, it was neither targeted nor strategic in the approach they had to laying off workers. And that to me is really the more fundamental issue.

Terry Gerton Doug Pasternak is the research director of Public Citizens Trump Accountability Project. Doug, as you talk about releasing a lot of people and then having to bring people back, there’s a cost, a money cost associated with the hiring process there that may not be included in your total cost of this program. But you also mentioned the cost in terms of the impact on everyday citizens. Where does that show up here?

Doug Pasternak So from what I looked at, the analysis I conducted, and there have been lots of new stories on this, I really did a literature search and looked at all the articles that were talking about this program, and what I found was that things like social security checks going out, it was having an impact because people were let go. People go into VA clinics that need critical medical services. They weren’t getting them in time because you’ve got a reduction in staff. Again, the IRS fired, in some cases fired, in some case part of the deferred resignation program, about 17% of their IT staff. Critical issues that really need to be taken care of. Forest fires and firemen to help prevent that have been let go. And again, critically, this has had an impact on national security issues. There are several agencies, again, where people took part in this program and then were called back. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration program had people called back. The Defense Information Systems Agency had people called back, as I mentioned, CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, fired people or put them on the deferred resignation program and then realized, uh-oh, we really need them and called them back in to the office. So that’s the impact kind of across the board. And one other point that I think is really important, you brought this up at the beginning, then the private sector, you know, there are people that are often put on severance packages or let go. And I’ve seen arguments from the administration that in the long term, this will save money. What we found in one case looking at IRS workers was there was a report from the Yale University’s budget lab and they looked at a 22% reduction of the IRS workers and the impact that would have. And they found over a 10-year period, it would reduce revenue to the U.S. government by $200 billion. That was a hypothetical. In reality, the Trump administration has let go 28 percent of IRS workers, even more than that report looked at. So it is having, and it will have over the long term, an economic impact. It’s not just the $11 billion of paying these workers to stay home or take vacation or not work. There are ripple effects of this that will fuel for a long time.

Terry Gerton Doug, from a taxpayer perspective, how should citizens expect to see the valuation of that impact in services? Where will it show up? When will it show up? How will they be able to process whether or not ultimately this was a savings effort?

Doug Pasternak I think that’s going to be really hard to do. Number one, this was the largest program the Trump administration had in terms of trying to let people go. There were about 140,000 people that took part in the Deferred Resignation Program, but there are other programs out there too. And looking at all of that in total. Again, I think it’s hard to quantify the specific impact, but you do see it in, again, things that everyday Americans rely on all the time. Social security checks being delayed and going out, people going to VA clinics, you know, public critical parts of public health where you don’t have the staff to look at that. You know, one analogy which I’ve looked at is if you had a small hospital in a rural setting and you really need to cut costs, you would not go in there and randomly take a chainsaw and cut 25% of the neonatal unit staff and 50% of their cardiology staff. You know, 35% of the neurology staff, and then do an analysis as to what staff you really needed. That is exactly what the Trump administration has done. And again, GAO, nonpartisan, nonpolitical entity, works for Congress. In their analysis, they found that there was no strategic method. At the General Services Administration, they found they cut a ton of staff, I think it was 40 percent, and afterwards then they did a workforce analysis to see the number of staff they actually needed, so they’re forced to rehire staff back. So part of this issue to me is the financial cost, but the other part is the ineffective and really incompetent management in the way this program was rolled out.

Terry Gerton Whoever comes in in the next administration will be dealing with the ramifications of these actions and the implications that they have for agency mission performance. If cost is going to be difficult to quantify, is there some other metric that you’d recommend we start watching now to determine if four or five years from now we can assess the value of this approach?

Doug Pasternak Well, I think, again, GAO has done several reports. They’ve done at least three or four, maybe it’s more now, several reports on pieces of this. They’ve looked at specific agencies and what the impact has been. So I think you can see the impact through that. You know, and again, what they found was there’s no strategic plan here. You’re letting people go. You realize you need them. You’re calling them back. And as a result, you’re having IT systems at the IRS that need more staff. That’s pretty freaking important, you know? So you see the impact in those kinds of ways. there are lots of forest fires now, and if you’re firemen, you know, out there fighting these, that’s going to have an impact. You’re going to lose homes, you’re gonna lose businesses as a result of not having the people out there. So I think there will be lots of analyzes that will be done looking at that and some of that has started, but I think it’s going also take a long time to get your full arms around the total cost of this.