Nine months into the second Trump administration, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s effort to shrink and reshape the Pentagon’s civilian workforce has netted a reduction of more than 60,000 employees, or about 7.6 percent, comfortably reaching the 5- to 8-percent goal he set in March.
But while the Pentagon provided those numbers to Defense One, they provided few other details, leaving it hard to judge how the effort to cut payroll and redirect resources is going. Multiple officials declined to talk about various problems caused by the sweeping cuts and policy changes Hegseth ordered just weeks into his job. They also declined to comment on criticism by current and former employees who say the changes were ill-planned and have hurt productivity and morale among the country’s largest national-security workforce.
“The consensus among the rank-and-file DOD employees is that the SecDef has essentially declared war on his civilian workforce, creating an atmosphere of mutual distrust and an implication that all DOD civilians are untrustworthy parasites until proven otherwise,” one department civilian, who asked not to be identified to prevent retaliation, told Defense One.
To shrink his workforce, Hegseth fired probationary employees, froze hiring, offered buyouts, reopened early retirement, and ordered department organizations to submit ideas for eliminating “redundant or non-essential functions.”
Pentagon leaders have called these moves responsible and thoughtful.
“As Secretary Hegseth made clear, it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical,” John Ullyot, then a Pentagon spokesperson, told Defense One in March. “Taxpayers deserve to have us take a thorough look at our workforce top-to-bottom to see where we can eliminate redundancies. That said, as we take these important steps to reshape the workforce to meet the President’s priorities, the Department will treat our workers with dignity and respect as it always does.”
But department leaders have often fallen short of that pledge. Probationary employees were illegally fired. Current and former employees have said that murky or nonexistent guidance about the new policies have caused confusion. Multiple sources cited the ongoing hiring freeze that kept employees in hotels waiting for exemptions so they could move to their new DOD jobs overseas, and is now trapping other employees who are trying to complete transfers back to the United States.
All this, combined with an exodus of civilian employees from an organization long accustomed to “doing more with less,” has made the massive workload even harder to tackle.
Some commands are “close to a breaking point of simply not being able to accomplish key requirements—and I know that is true across the globe as well,” the DOD civilian said.
Buyouts and early-outs
The biggest chunk of the 60,000-plus workers shed came from buyouts and early retirements.
DOD approved 55,000 applications for the Deferred Resignation Program and another 6,100 for the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority program, a Pentagon official told Defense One, asking for anonymity without giving a reason.
Hegseth did not limit how many people could take the offers, and allowed the services only rare rejections of applicants deemed vital to national security.
This had larger effects on some organizations than on others. In May, the Space Force reported that it had already lost 14 percent of its civilians to buyouts.
“Because our numbers are so much smaller, I feel like the efforts to reduce the overall federal workforce had a little bit of an outsized impact on the Space Force,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference outside Washington, D.C. “In an attempt to get the entire workforce down 5 percent, certainly the civilians at [Space Systems Command] were above 10 percent, for sure, in some of those losses.”
“The corporate knowledge—the expertise that our civilian workforce brings—is vital to acquisitions, and so the Deferred Resignation Program certainly took some of those out of play,” Saltzman said.
Firing ‘probies’
Another way Pentagon leaders sought to trim headcount was by firing probationary employees—generally, workers new to the department, recently promoted, or recently transferred from other DOD jobs—whose civil-service protections had yet to kick in.
Prompted by the White House, Pentagon officials announced in February that they would fire 5,400 probationary employees. They removed 364 before a judge ordered them to stop and to rehire the ones who had left. The Supreme Court eventually knocked down the injunction, allowing such firings to resume, but the Pentagon is still required to send letters to the fired employees stating they were not dismissed for cause.
The department’s personnel office declined to provide a current status of the firing, or rehiring, of probationary employees while litigation is pending, according to the Pentagon official.
Hiring freeze, still on
On Feb. 28, Hegseth ordered a hiring freeze across his department, just eight days after announcing one was on the way.
The short-notice order forced managers to rescind job offers to thousands of people. The Army alone told 2,000 people that their new jobs had disappeared, spokesman Lt. Col. Orlandon Howard told Defense One.
The freeze also prevented thousands of current employees from moving to new jobs within the department.
Some employees found themselves trapped overseas, unable to return to the United States to take up their new jobs. Many were housed in hotels at government expense for more than a month, having given up their residences and dispatched their possessions to their new places of employment.
In the Army, 150 employees were eventually allowed to move on after exemptions were secured, Howard said. The Space Force’s Saltzman said he had been able to secure enough exemptions to keep his service’s growth plans on track.
But the freeze is still gumming up civilians who are finishing up overseas assignments and are unable to move into new roles in the United States.
“Currently, those that reach the end of their tour cannot leave because there are no jobs to apply to, and cannot leave on [the Priority Placement Program] because empty positions can’t be filled unless it is mission-critical, health- or safety-related,” the civilian said. “Basically, trapped overseas indefinitely.”
The exemption process is bottlenecked by Hegseth, who initially insisted on personally reviewing every request. He widened the path slightly in a March 18 memo that delegated the task to the defense undersecretary for personnel and readiness and the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, but added, “This authority may not be further delegated.”
Asked about the hiring freeze and its effects, Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to answer.
The first Pentagon official declined to provide numbers, including total number of job offers rescinded at the beginning of the freeze and total number of employees who have requested exemptions to be able to complete permanent change-of-station moves to new roles.
The official referred such questions to the military departments, and declined to provide figures for defense agencies that aren’t part of a service branch, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and Defense Health Agency.
The Air Force did not respond to Defense One’s request for information as of publication. A spokeswoman for the Navy declined to comment entirely.
The military departments were required to send such figures to Hegseth’s personnel undersecretary, but the spokesperson said the figures were not tracked.
The Pentagon has no estimate of how much money it spent on hotel costs and other incidentals for employees who had moved out of their homes and were forced to cancel and rebook flights, because each of those cases were approved at a command level, the spokesperson said.
How many employees?
In late March, Hegseth ordered Pentagon leaders to come up with ways to shrink and reorganize their commands, agencies, and departments—and to submit their proposals within two weeks. A March 29 press release touted the order, and an April 7 memo from the deputy defense secretary ordered more detailed submissions by late May.
In June, a Pentagon official said the suggestions came in on time, but declined to say what they were or what came of them.
“Certain near-term changes in workforce structure, composition, and workforce will be reflected in the department’s forthcoming President’s Budget request for FY26,” said the defense official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
The budget proposal, released later that month, asks for a 5.4-percent drop in civilian headcount, from 789,775 in fiscal 2025 to 747,380 next year.
Pentagon officials declined to explain how that 42,395-person reduction was decided upon and which job titles were merged or eliminated to get there.
Meanwhile, the Air Force is cutting 5,000 civilian jobs in the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, according to a leaked internal email sent to personnel at the Air Force Academy. The message, sent by the school’s superintendent in July, said the academy would be shedding 140 civilians.
Rather than wait for a layoff, Brian Johns quit his job as a USAFA assistant professor of mechanical engineering and took a new position at Colorado State University.
He’d already had one scare on Feb. 27, Johns told Defense One, when the colonel in charge of his department sat him down and told him he’d likely be laid off the following day as part of the purge of probationary employees—despite the fact that he’d been in his position for longer than a year and was no longer in a probationary status.
“So a couple weeks later they mentioned via email that my name was on the firing list mistakenly,” Johns said. “Was it a mistake or was it intentional? Nonetheless, it didn’t alleviate any of the stress.”
Johns had taken the AFA position in 2023 after leaving a tenured professorship at Cornell College in Iowa. The lawsuits to undo the probationary employee layoffs protected his job for the moment, but the writing was already on the wall.
“If I knew that my job would be in jeopardy in a couple of years, I probably wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “I wouldn’t wish that kind of uncertainty and anxiety on anybody during that six-month period.”
What comes next
It’s difficult to quantify the results of DOD’s civilian purge. Despite Hegseth’s frequent pledges of transparency, department officials declined to provide key figures—starting with the current number of civilian employees. Instead, the Pentagon official provided the count as of Jan. 1, before any of the downsizing efforts, which at the time came in at 799,000.
By the Pentagon’s numbers, the workforce as of the beginning of this year, minus those who voluntarily moved on, comes to 737,900. That is 9,480 short of the ceiling in the FY ‘26 budget request. Valdez declined to say whether the department would work toward filling those openings by hiring freeze-exempt workers, like shipyard technicians or childcare teachers.
The Pentagon also declined to answer whether or when the hiring freeze might lift. As it continues, there are not only jobs staying open, but existing civilians are largely not able to transfer into them.
“Although the SecDef uses language implying the importance of the civilian workforce, it sounds nice and briefs well,” the civilian said. “These words are hollow and have no meaning.”
Tom Novelly contributed to this report.
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