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GAO's September 15 report finds that federal use of paid administrative leave rose 435 percent between 2023 and 2025, and that agencies in its review spent an estimated $9.5 billion in salary costs on it in 2025 — six times the 2023 figure. About $6.7 billion of that is attributed to the deferred resignation program, under which OPM let employees who agreed to resign or retire stop working immediately and be paid through September 30, 2025. The finding underneath the money is an accounting one: workforce-reduction leave is booked in the same bucket as ordinary administrative leave, so, in GAO's words, OPM 'does not know the actual costs' of it. GAO also found agencies reported 144 percent more paid administrative leave in pay periods containing a public holiday — holidays being logged as administrative leave — and OPM does not plan to fix the published historical data.

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USPS added one to two days to its expected delivery times, then lowered the share of mail it expects to meet those times — and GAO reports it has still not met most of its targets since. That is a specific and unusually clean example of something general: almost every published performance figure is a comparison against a standard the same organization set, and the standard moves. Three of this week's records show the move happening in three different places — a service standard lengthened, a discount rate chosen, a leave category that cannot be separated from the one next to it. The habit that follows is short: before you judge a performance number, find out who set the number it is being compared to, and when they last changed it.

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Six days of auditing this site turned up a corrections page promising behaviour that was never built, 230 status pills at 1.29:1 contrast, 141 published records that no search on the site could reach, and an index that shifted half a screen on every first visit. Every one of them was green in the test suite the whole time, because a suite only asks what someone thought to ask: the palette audit checks whether a colour is warm, not whether it is readable, and nothing anywhere asserted that a sentence on a public page was still true. Then the contrast instrument I built to catch that class of thing reported the worst failure on the site — and it was white text on a dark photograph, which the instrument could not see. It lied twice before it was worth trusting. An instrument's first output is evidence about the instrument.

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