Karen Atchison and Tracy Hinnant say federal retirees are struggling to make ends meet as nearly 30,000 applications remain unprocessed.

WASHINGTON — Karen Atchison and Tracy Hinnant are more than longtime friends — they are also former colleagues who spent decades working at the Internal Revenue Service.

Atchison dedicated 41 years to the IRS. Hinnant spent 37 ½ years in federal service. But in the early months of 2025, like thousands of other federal employees, they faced the Trump administration’s aggressive push to shrink the federal workforce.

RELATED: Laid-off federal workers struggle to navigate job market hardships

While some colleagues were abruptly terminated, Atchison and Hinnant chose another path: the government’s Deferred Resignation Program, known as DRP.

“We took the DRP. There was DRP 1 — I didn’t trust it,” Hinnant said. “I decided to do DRP 2. I stopped physically working in May, and then my retirement date was Sept. 30. So as of Sept. 30, I have had no income from the federal government at all.”


The program allowed both women to formally retire from federal service. They say they submitted their retirement paperwork before leaving, expecting their benefits to begin within weeks — not months.

But the payments never came.

That includes not only their monthly retirement annuities, but also checks for accrued annual leave.

“Everyone was hoping to live off their annual leave checks while we were waiting these four or five months for our annuity checks,” Atchison said. “They haven’t even processed us off the agency rolls.”

Emails sent by the IRS to retirees acknowledged delays in processing, citing an “unusually high volume of September retirements.” The agency also confirmed contractors were brought in to help manage what it called an “unprecedented volume of retirements.”

According to data from the Office of Personnel Management, more than 112,000 federal employees retired during fiscal year 2025, which ended Sept. 30. The Trump administration shed 317,000 workers last year. 

Atchison says she expected to receive about $6,000 a month in retirement benefits.

“We don’t even know what’s coming in,” she said, describing the uncertainty surrounding both owed retirement benefits and accrued leave payments.

Hinnant is anticipating more than $7,000 a month. While she waits, she’s relying heavily on her small business to cover essential expenses. Atchison says she’s getting by with help from her adult children and a loan.

Still, both women say they recognize others are in even more dire circumstances — including retirees who have documented losing property as the delays drag on.

While some retirees report they are finally receiving payments, others — particularly those who retired from the IRS — remain in limbo.

“My understanding on the IRS side is that there were a number of applications still pending HR review,” said Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management. “HR teams needed to confirm years of service and things like that. We at OPM have been able to push about half of the pending cases through automatically.”

Kupor said OPM is now working with the IRS on a fix to push the remaining applications through. However, no firm timeline has been provided.

“We’ve received about 100,000 retirement applications over the course of this year,” Kupor said. “Roughly 29,000 are still sitting in a payroll pending status.”