(The Center Square) – The Pentagon is working toward deeper cuts to its civilian workforce after about 21,000 civilian employees volunteered for a federal Deferred Resignation Program.
The department wants to cut 5% to 8% of civilian employees, or about 50,000 to 60,000 employees.
Office of Personnel Management sent an email Jan. 28 to nearly all federal employees in the executive branch offering them a deferred resignation package – similar to a buyout – called the Fork in the Road directive. It gave federal workers a choice: continue working knowing that Trump plans to restructure the federal workforce and expects everyone back in the office or leave with eight months of pay. Defense officials said about 21,000 employees volunteered for the Deferred Resignation Program. The department approved the majority of those applications, a senior defense official said.
In addition to the Deferred Resignation Program, Pentagon officials expect to cut about 6,000 employees per month in the coming months through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s hiring freeze. The largest federal agency also plans to dismiss about 5,400 probationary workers, but those plans remain the subject of litigation.
Hegseth is confident the cuts can be done without affecting military readiness, the senior defense official said.
The U.S. government employs about 2.4 million federal workers, excluding the military (about 1.3 million active-duty military personnel) and U.S. Postal Service (about 600,000 employees), according to 2024 Pew Research report. That report noted that the federal government employed 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce. That percentage includes postal employees, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The Trump administration said that even government employees who stay on could lose their jobs as the president reshapes the federal government and its workforce.
Just how much Trump can do to reduce the size of the federal government remains to be seen. On Tuesday, a federal judge said Trump’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development “likely violated the United States Constitution.”
