Watchdog Reveals $270B Federal Payroll, Calls For Spending Cuts
The federal payroll has ballooned into an opaque, expensive machine that taxpayers are now being asked to fund without enough answers. New watchdog findings show runaway growth in salaries, massive redactions hiding billions in pay, and concrete examples of double-dipping that demand stronger oversight. Lawmakers and reformers are pushing transparency measures to force agencies to report exactly who was paid and why, and the debate now centers on bringing federal staffing back under control. The stakes are simple: taxpayers deserve visibility, accountability, and a government that lives within its means.
The latest watchdog review counted roughly 2.9 million civil service employees in Fiscal Year 2024 and placed total payroll at about $270 billion, with benefits adding roughly 30 percent on top of that figure. Those totals do not feel like belt-tightening; they read as expansion, with payroll climbing far faster than headcount. The average cost to taxpayers has surged into eye-popping per-minute and per-day figures, making this more than a budget line item — it is a structural problem.
Open The Books found the federal workforce now costs taxpayers about $673,000 per minute, $40.4 million per hour and just under $1 billion per day. The report also identified nearly 1,000 employees earning more than the president’s $400,000 salary, and 31,452 non-War Department employees out-earning every state governor. The number of federal workers pulling six-figure paychecks has surged, with 793,537 people making $100,000 or more and steep increases at the top of the scale.
There are alarming growth rates among the highest-paid employees: those earning $300,000 or more jumped 84 percent since 2020, while those making $200,000 or more rose 82 percent. Those are not small accountings; they are signals that pay structures are shifting dramatically. A payroll that balloons at that pace calls for new scrutiny, not more secrecy.
Transparency problems compound the cost problem: the watchdog discovered 383,000 federal worker names redacted across 56 agencies, concealing about $38.3 billion in wages. That level of redaction defeats basic public oversight and feeds suspicion that agencies are protecting insiders rather than taxpayers. As one watchdog leader put it, “You can’t have accountability without visibility.”
“The Trump administration has a historic opportunity to bring much-needed transparency to the administrative state. While federal employees don’t add as much to the debt as safety net programs, defense, and overall agency spending, they are an indicator of government’s growth,” Hart said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Our investigators found far too many redactions and blind spots that DOGE should have already fixed. You can’t have accountability without visibility. Taxpayers need a much clearer picture of the federal workforce than they have today.”
Senator Joni Ernst has been pushing this issue into lawmaking, highlighting concrete cases of abuse and double-pay that ordinary taxpayers cannot tolerate. “From 2021 to 2024, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employee held multiple other full-time government contractor jobs, frequently billing taxpayers for more than 24 hours of work in a single day,” Ernst chronicled in her letter. That one allegation alone described $225,866 billed for time that investigators say could not have been worked.
Ernst also pointed to a human resources official at the Peace Corps who falsified timecards and double-billed agencies for tens of thousands of dollars. Those examples are not abstract; they show how remote work and poor oversight create loopholes for deliberate or careless abuse. For Republicans and fiscal conservatives who want a smaller, smarter government, these are the kinds of cases that demand stronger enforcement and clearer rules.
“Until recently, outside of death and taxes, the expanding Washington bureaucracy was one of the few certainties in life,” said Ernst. “I am proud to have partnered with the Trump administration and DOGE to successfully downsize the bloated bureaucracy, but there is much more work to be done to make Washington more efficient.” Her Non-Essential Workers Transparency Act would force agencies to disclose detailed shutdown-related payrolls within 30 days, including furloughed counts and salaries, contractor totals, and public posting requirements.
The context is raw: a shutdown fight that left 750,000 non-essential employees off the clock still produced more than $12 billion in back pay obligations. That episode crystallizes why transparency matters — without it, Congress and taxpayers cannot measure the real cost of staffing decisions. Lawmakers now have a chance to insist that agencies publish exact numbers and close the loopholes that let people double-dip on the public dime.
There is momentum for reform on the right: shrink the parts of government that creep beyond their mission, expose redactions that hide spending, and punish double-billing and fraud swiftly. The facts in the watchdog report make a clear case for accountability and for restoring discipline to federal hiring and payroll practices. Taxpayers should expect nothing less than full visibility into who is paid, how much, and why.
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