Officials shed light on ‘active process’ to shrink DOD’s workforce by more than 50,000 personnel

The Pentagon is currently placing more than 20,000 employees on administrative leave and a path to full termination, following staff approval for voluntary participation in the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-inspired “fork in the road” initiative, according to top officials involved in the major workforce reduction plans.

In an off-camera press briefing Tuesday, two senior defense officials provided new information (on the condition of anonymity) regarding the Defense Department’s unfolding effort to shrink its massive civilian employee pool using three main mechanisms.

“I just want to stress — this is a very active process. So when we in [the personnel and readiness directorate] work in connection with services and components, we are taking their very active input and analysis on the employees and the skills and attributes they need to get after the functions the secretary is directing them to do,” an official told DefenseScoop.

At the start of his second administration, President Donald Trump immediately directed federal agencies to drastically reduce their workforces and review existing contracts as part of a broader move to ultimately cut back on what his team views as wasteful spending and inefficiencies. 

Inside the DOD, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a “strategic reduction” of 5-8% of civilian personnel — with a sharp focus on “promoting the department’s lethality, readiness and warfighting ability” while meeting Trump’s mandate, a senior defense official noted.

They confirmed that the department’s civilian workforce encompasses roughly 800,000 appropriated-fund employees, around 100,000 who fall under non-appropriated funds and additional numbers in other categories, such as foreign nationals. 

“So the 5% to 8% figure breaks down to something in the 50- to 60,000 range” slated for termination, the senior defense official said.

DOD leadership is at this point using three primary methods to determine who will be approved or chosen to depart.

“The first is the voluntary employee participation ‘deferred resignation program.’ I also refer to that as the DRP. I know some of you also refer to that as the ‘fork in the road.’ Number two, we’re removing certain probationary employees. And lastly, [we’re] instituting a hiring freeze,” a senior defense official explained.

The DRP is related to the Office of Personnel Management’s offer that allowed federal employees to indicate that they’d like to exit the government and, if approved, continue to receive pay until their resignation goes into effect Sept. 30. 

At the time, OPM dubbed the offer “Fork in the Road,” which echoes a message that tech billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk — who now runs the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — previously sent to Twitter employees after he bought the company and started transforming it into X.

“Today, the department has approved more than 20,000, nearing 21,000, of the applications for employees that volunteered to participate in the deferred resignation program. So those will actually be achieved over time. We’re in the process of placing those employees that were approved on administrative leave. They’ll have a variety of actual departure dates from department employment,” a senior defense official said, suggesting that the majority would be completely separated from the DOD by the end of 2025.

As part of the planned reduction, Hegseth also called for the termination of about 5,400 probationary employees. However, the statuses of those officials are in limbo following a recent court order. 

“That action has become the subject of litigation, and so I direct any further questions about that process to the Department of Justice,” a senior defense official told reporters. 

The third method for decreasing personnel numbers involves the recent initiation of a department-wide, temporary hiring pause, they added — referring to this one as “passive,” instead of voluntary.

“It was directed by the Secretary Hegseth, and we have annually something like an average of 70,000 civilian employees onboard at the department. So it breaks down to something like 6,000 new hires a month. So without having to remove any existing employees through the hiring freeze, that just naturally creates something like 6,000 civilian workforce slots a month of natural attrition,” the official explained.

Security clearances could factor into decisions about who stays and who goes.

“This was not just a blind process, it was a case-by-case process. And certainly, clearances and other aspects of training would be relevant considerations when deciding how to shape any of the workforce directions with respect to probationary employees. I would say something similar when you look at something like DRP. We were [just] speaking about the fact that we worked hand-in-hand with the services to ensure that each application was vetted, and we knew that we could absorb any resulting impacts without harming the department’s readiness,” an official said. “And so that would also include things like clearance level, but no, it wouldn’t just be a de-facto category.”

The briefers did not provide more information about the civilian roles at DOD that are considered key to the new administration’s focus on lethality and readiness — or whether technology positions are in high-priority employment categories.

“Any critical area that the secretary or the services have identified is going to be weighed heavily when determining which portions of the workforce at what skillsets need to be retained,” a senior defense official told DefenseScoop.