About 5,400 Defense Department employees will lose their jobs next week, the first cuts in what will ultimately be a five-to-eight-percent reduction of the civilian workforce, a Pentagon official said Friday.
The cost-saving goal was announced in a statement released by Darin Selnick, who is temporarily serving as DOD’s personnel chief. The department employed 764,000 civilians as of June 2024, according to Office of Personnel Management data, which means more than 61,000 people could lose their jobs.
Selnick said the first 5,400 to get the axe will be “probationary employees”—generally speaking, people who have been promoted, shifted to a new job, or hired within the past year; such workers have fewer civil-service protections.
The news comes after a week in which Pentagon organizations compiled lists of their probationary employees and requesting exemptions from sweeping staff reductions.
The move also follows cuts spurred by the Department of Government Efficiency, a White House advisory board, which slashed thousands of jobs across federal agencies in recent weeks.
“We believe in the goals of the program, and our leaders are carrying out that review carefully and smartly,” Selnick said in the statement.
After next week’s firings, the Pentagon will institute a hiring freeze, then launch a “top-to-bottom” review of its civilian personnel needs, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an eight-minute video posted Thursday evening.
Eight percent is also the figure the acting deputy defense secretary called for in a memo this week asking the military departments to shift funding from “so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs” deemed not in line with President Donald Trump’s priorities.
“As the Secretary made clear, it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical,” Selnick wrote. “Taxpayers deserve to have us take a thorough look at our workforce top-to-bottom to see where we can eliminate redundancies.”
In his video, Hegseth insisted the initial firings will only hit “underperformers.” Selnick’s statement does not mention performance as part of the firing considerations.
Selnick also did not address reports that the first round of firings, initially expected this week, were delayed because Pentagon leaders had not performed an analysis of workforce reductions’ expected effects on lethality and readiness.
Hegseth did not say how the firings might comport with laws that give hiring preference to veterans and that offer broad protections to career federal employees.
The White House has not released any detailed tally of how many federal workers have lost their jobs in the past weeks, but they include more than 19,000 probationary employees at the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Veterans Affairs, and other departments, as well as at the Environmental Protection Agency, OPM, and DOGE—formerly known as the U.S. Digital Service—itself.
OPM data shows that the federal government hired more than 200,000 employees over the past year.
