WASHINGTON (AP) – About 50,000 to 60,000 civilian jobs are lowered in the Ministry of Defense, but fewer than 21,000 employees who have taken a voluntary dismissal plan will leave in the coming months, told a high defense officer to reporters on Tuesday.
To achieve the goal of a reduced workforce from 5% to 8% of more than 900,000, the civil servant said, the department wants to beat around 6,000 positions per month by simply replacing employees who leave routinely.
An important concern is that service members can then be tapped to fulfill those civilian jobs. But the civil servant, who spoke about the condition of anonymity to provide personnel details, said that Minister of Defense Pete Hegseeth wants to ensure that the cutbacks do not harm military readiness.
The cutbacks are part of the broader effort of the Department of Government Efficiency Service, including billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk, to lower the federal workforce and dismantle American agencies.
Recognizing that “some” military veterans will be the citizens who let go, the official would not estimate how much but it agreed that it could be thousands.
The Department uses three ways to reach the cuts on the workforce: voluntary retirements, the firing of probation workers and cutting jobs as employees leave. The official said that the military services and Pentagon officials go through the staff on a case-by-case basis to ensure that cutbacks have no influence on the critical jobs in national security.
Plans to cut probation workers – of which the Pentagon said it was aimed at around 5,400 of the approximately 54,000 in the department – are already on hold because of judicial challenges.
The official added that Hegseeth is convinced that the cuts can be made without negatively influencing the military readiness.
