The Defense Department plans to offer a new round of voluntary resignations and early retirements to the civilian workforce, but how it will go about this is unclear.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a new memo that orders the Defense Department’s top personnel official to “immediately” offer retirement to all eligible civilian employees and open a deferred resignation program, DefenseScoop first reported.
In the memo, signed Friday but released to defense officials Monday, Hegseth said that “exemptions should be rare,” as the intent is to “maximize participation” so the Pentagon can minimize the number of firings “that may be required to achieve the strategic objectives.”
The memo does not specify what any retirement or resignation offers would entail or how many of the Pentagon’s 900,000-person civilian workforce will receive them.
The move comes as defense leaders are looking to axe tens of thousands of the military’s civilian employees and reinvest the savings elsewhere — part of a broader effort by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to greatly reduce the federal workforce and shutter an unknown number of agencies.
Nearly 21,000 DOD civilian workers have already taken a voluntary resignation buyout earlier this year, which Pentagon officials referred to as a “Fork in the Road” offer, and are leaving in the coming months.
The department wants to cut 50,000 to 60,000 civilian jobs — about 5 to 8 percent of the overall workforce — over the next several months via voluntary resignations and not replacing workers who leave, a senior defense official told reporters in mid-March.
Hegseth stressed the cuts are needed for the department to streamline resources.
“This is not about a target number of layoffs at the DoD,” he writes. “The intent is to execute a top-to-bottom methodology that results in a force structure that is lean, mean, and prepared to win.”
An initial proposal on the plan is expected by April 11.
