The Pentagon said Tuesday it will cut between 50,000 and 60,000 civilian jobs -- or 5% to 8% of a workforce that includes thousands of veterans -- through firings, resignations and a hiring freeze to meet Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's goal.
Hegseth's office said nearly a month ago, in February, that it was starting those cuts by firing 5,400 probationary employees. The figure was announced after reports emerged of an initial plan to just fire huge swaths of civilian workers, which raised concerns inside the Pentagon.
Now that court cases have forced the Trump administration's widespread government firings to halt, a top defense official told reporters that the Pentagon will focus largely on getting to that 60,000 figure by either incentivizing employees to leave or not hiring new employees. However, both of these methods also have major caveats.
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"The majority of the workforce reduction effort is voluntary measures, and the biggest component of that to date has been [the deferred resignation program]," a senior defense official said Tuesday. The official spoke anonymously as a condition of the interview.
The deferred resignation program, or DRP, is the official name for the scheme that emerged out of billionaire Elon Musk's "Fork in the Road" email that went out to all federal employees in late January and offered them the chance to walk away from their jobs while still getting paid until October. Musk has been slashing federal agencies and firing tens of thousands of federal employees with Trump's approval.
Concerns over the legality of the offer were raised almost immediately by outside experts, but the senior official said that the Department of Defense "approved more than 20,000 ... nearing 21,000 of the applications from employees that volunteered" as part of that program.
Federal employees are no longer able to take that offer, so it is unlikely that large pool of volunteers will grow in the future.
The senior official also said that part of the department's calculation to achieve a 5% to 8% reduction in workers includes a hiring freeze to cull around 6,000 people for every month it remains in effect.
As of Friday, though, Hegseth has allowed the military branches to approve exemptions to the freeze, after review by the personnel and readiness directorate within his office.
The defense secretary also granted blanket exemptions to "shipyards, depots, and medical treatment facilities." The senior official said they couldn't say how many exemptions have been granted to date but described it as "a very active process."
Meanwhile, the plan to actually fire probationary employees appears to be on hold.
After announcing the plan Feb. 21, it took the Pentagon a few weeks to begin to notify employees.
Military.com reported March 5 that civilian workers in at least four organizations -- the Defense Health Agency, Defense Logistics Agency, the Navy and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences -- had been told they were fired while officials in Hegseth's office wouldn't provide the total number of firings in the department as a whole.
Then, late last week, two federal judges ruled that the Trump administration's mass firings -- characterized by board terminations of many probationary employees across numerous agencies, including the Pentagon -- were likely unlawful and the employees had to be re-hired.
As a result, the senior official would say only that the plan to remove 5,400 probationary employees was "the subject of ongoing litigation" and that the Pentagon was "committed to fully complying with every applicable court order regarding the process."
The official didn't answer questions about how close the department got to its goal of 5,400 civilian employees or whether they had since been re-hired.
The senior official also argued that the Pentagon "did not undertake probationary employee removals just blindly based on the time they had been hired" and that "the fact that someone was a probationary employee did not directly mean that they were going to be subject to removal."
Reporters have discovered that fast-moving and wide-reaching efforts by Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to trim the federal workforce resulted in the removal of key experts, like those responsible for America's nuclear weapons and scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu.
After those actions became public, the Trump administration then moved to hire those employees back.
Some of the DOGE-inspired policies, like the clampdown on government travel card spending, led to similar unintended consequences at the Pentagon, too.
Military.com first reported that on March 7 the Army suddenly halted travel funding that enabled potential recruits to take the military entrance exam at remote locations and high schools and furloughed all the employees. Then, a week later, the program was reinstated.
However, it appears that Hegseth, who until recently was personally involved in some of the decisions surrounding which employees could stay or go, is not backing away from his goal of trimming his department's workforce.
"There are other methods available to the secretary," the senior official said, adding that "it'll be the secretary's prerogative to designate how and when he might use any of the other tools that would be available to him to achieve the state of reduction targets."
The senior official also conceded that the workforce reductions will affect some of the more than 30,000 veterans who are employed by the Pentagon.
"Within the military, there are times where you see that individuals will leave service when their services are no longer directly in the nation's interest," the senior official said. "The same thing is true in the civilian side, and some of those people will be veterans that served in uniform previously."
Related: Firings Begin at the Pentagon: Veterans, Civil Servants Caught in the Crosshairs
