A year into Hegseth’s cuts, Defense civilians report ‘degraded performance’ and low morale

A year after Secretary Pete Hegseth launched a hasty effort to reduce the Defense Department’s civilian workforce by up to 61,000 people, employees are reporting gutted offices, lower productivity, and pervasive uncertainty.

“The climate, at least in my immediate organization, has shifted from fear to stress,” said an Air Force civilian who spoke with Defense One. “The fear of imminent [reductions-in-force] is not something we talk about much anymore because, while the threat of it persistently looms in the air, it is not in our best interest to constantly worry about it. Frankly, I'm too exhausted to keep thinking about it.”

All of the DoD civilians who shared their thoughts for this story requested anonymity to prevent retaliation by their employer.

Within weeks of taking office last January, Hegseth ordered voluntary and involuntary cuts, along with a partial hiring freeze that forced managers to rescind untold numbers of job offers—untold because Pentagon officials have refused to say how many of those positions disappeared in the process. The freeze has also blocked the movement of thousands of employees to new roles, although some are now moving via a cumbersome exemption process. 

In total, nearly 110,000 of the department’s roughly 795,000 civilians departed last year, about 80 percent more than Hegseth’s goal. Some 30,000 jobs deemed essential to national security were subsequently re-filled.

Those numbers come from a Daily Wire story that Pentagon spokesman Jacob Bliss forwarded as a response to eight questions about the cuts and their effects. Bliss and other spokespeople did not respond to follow-up requests to answer the remaining questions.

The Office of Personnel Management’s workforce data confirms that DoD’s civilian workforce sits at just above 694,000.

Bliss declined to say whether there is a planned end to the hiring freeze; to provide examples of job titles that have been downgraded or merged in accordance with Hegseth’s March 28 directive; and to explain what, if anything, the department has done to address loss of productivity. 

According to Pentagon data obtained by the Daily Wire, 14,606 of last year’s departures were involuntary. One of the department’s first moves was to dismiss 5,400 probationary employees—generally, people on the job for less than a year—for purported “performance issues.” Lawsuits delayed but ultimately did not block these firings, although a judge compelled Pentagon leaders to admit that the “performance” rationale was a lie.

In September, Hegseth signed another memo laying out a path for the quick firing of “low performers.” Bliss declined to say how many employees have been pushed out under that framework. 

Then there were the voluntary resignations: 94,835 in total, according to the Daily Wire. That included 49,991 through the Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed employees to leave their jobs while being paid through the end of the fiscal year. This number is several thousand below the 55,000 figure provided to Defense One at the end of September.

Another 6,600 long-serving employees took an early-retirement offer: some 6,100 by August and the rest later in the year. 

‘Beginning to drop primary functions’

“I would say overall the DoD civilian policies over the past year have resulted in degraded performance and capability downgrade overall due to the loss of critical skill sets,” one department civilian said of the resignations, adding that the vacated jobs in his shop have largely remained unfilled or been converted to dual-status Title 32 National Guard jobs.

That has increased wait times and decreased IT services to the Pentagon organizations that depend on his shop, the civilian said

With the hiring freeze now entering its second year, the civilian held out little hope that any of the lost capability will be restored.

“There are a lot of unfilled positions that will remain vacant for the foreseeable future. For the most part, managers know not to ask for new staff,” the civilian said. “I would not say processes are becoming more efficient. Probably the reverse, with a lot of offices reducing hours and services.”

The Air Force civilian described his office’s manning shortfall as “severe,” with just one in three civilian core-operations staff remaining.

“My small organization has been hit disproportionately hard and is beginning to drop primary functions because we can no longer support them,” he said. 

His organization’s leaders have asked for exemptions to replace lost workers, but they’ve gone unanswered or been denied.

“Morale is as low as I can remember in the three-plus years that I've been there, primarily due to being overworked with just a 1 percent raise in salary for FY2026,” the civilian said. “The end-of-January bonuses announced by Hegseth have not materialized.”

Trapped overseas

For civilians working overseas, the ongoing hiring freeze has added another wrinkle: They largely can’t return to the U.S. unless they take a demotion or leave their jobs.

Every permanent change-of-station move, which is treated as a new hire, requires an exception-to-policy signed off by a military department head or equivalent leader, meaning that department civilians who may have signed on to take a promotion overseas with the intent to return stateside in a few years are effectively trapped. 

The Pentagon is only hiring for specific positions, which include jobs related to public safety, immigration enforcement, and technicians at shipyards and depots. The department has hired 29,347 people who fall into those categories, according to the data provided to the Daily Wire, but an overseas civilian who wants to move back stateside for one of those exempted positions still has to have an exception-to-policy approved. 

“I only know of one that was approved and it took nine months just to approve the ETP,” an Army civilian told Defense One.

The Army has created a sort of workaround for this problem. The Department of the Army Voluntary Reassignment Program is a repository of resumes posted by civilians who are interested in a transfer. Offices with open positions can search them for a possible candidate, but only if it would be a lateral move—no promotions are allowed, and they still require the Army secretary to approve an exception to policy. 

The only other option is to exercise one’s return rights, an emergency out for employees who began their careers stateside before taking a position overseas. But that means reverting to their previous job, even if it’s a demotion and a lower pay grade. 

“Part of Russ Vought's plan to make federal employees miserable as a whole, it seems,” the Army civilian said, alluding to the Office of Management and Budget director who, during the Biden administration, made speeches about his desire to put federal workers “in trauma.”

One in three federal employees works for the Defense Department—as of Thursday, 707,378 of the 2,074,649-strong federal workforce. Even so, DOD bore an outsized share of last year’s Trump-administration cuts, losing two of every five federal jobs eliminated, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

That means forty percent of the departed workers had been directly supporting the military.

“We are all collectively stereotyped as the proverbial lazy admin assistant at the local DMV, without realizing a large chunk of DOD civilians are in remote locations, in harm’s way, part of the intelligence apparatus—or in my case, 20 kilometers from the [Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea] undergoing the exact same challenges and living conditions as our uniformed counterparts,” the Army civilian said.

Still, the Army civilian said, there is some optimism—that the Pentagon’s trajectory will become unsustainable and require a correction, whether it’s during this administration or the next.

“I believe in time the machine will break and then the situation will improve, but until then, we work with what we have and hope our servicemen and women do not pay the price because we cannot support them sufficiently,” he said.

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals. Continuing to reduce the size of the federal government and its workforce remains “priority number one,” Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said March 5 at a government efficiency conference in Washington. But: “We probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly,” Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, told the Washington Post, which adds that the new hiring push “is unfolding under new rules designed to give the White House greater influence over the government’s 2 million-person civilian workforce.”

The question also remains whether Hegseth’s cuts have actually streamlined department processes. Pentagon officials have declined to say what came out of the secretary’s March order giving his senior leaders less than two weeks to submit proposals to shrink and reorganize their commands, agencies, and departments. 

And last May, when the acting Pentagon personnel chief withdrew the much-derided requirement that civilian employees submit a weekly list of five things they did, he told everyone to send him a suggestion to “improve Department efficiency or root out waste.” 

Bliss declined to say which, if any, of those suggestions have been implemented.