Braxton Taylor
Updated: March 12, 1:07 p.m.
Organizations across the Defense Department are reeling from a spate of Trump administration directives that are putting a halt to planned personnel moves and training while plunging many civilian workers into uncertainty.
The result is widespread demoralization and a lack of productivity caused by the distraction of new administrative requirements, anxiety about layoffs to come, and a sense of anomie about whether any work they do will matter, according to department employees who shared their stories with Defense One.
“It’s been very stressful. I passed my probationary period last year, but I’m still worried and anxious about the impending downsizing,” said an Air Force civilian, whose identity is being withheld to protect against retaliation. “I wish leadership would take a more composed, humane approach.”
The Pentagon has moved out swiftly to implement several executive orders and comply with other White House efforts purported to reduce wasteful government spending. But they’ve only created more waste and less efficiency, according to those feeling their effects.
Cuts, underway and on the way
On Feb. 20, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans to fire probationary employees—about 5,400 of some 55,000 at the department, officials said later—then impose a hiring freeze and ultimately cut 5 to 8 percent of his department’s roughly 760,000-person civilian workforce. This would be a “really thorough look at our workforce top to bottom, and it will be top to bottom, to see where we can find and eliminate redundancies” with the goals of “securing the nation and spending your taxpayer dollars, ours, wisely,” Hegseth said in a video message,
The Trump administration has targeted probationary employees—generally, people hired in the past year or two—as part of a larger effort to shrink the federal workforce. New hires don’t have the same robust job protections as their more seasoned colleagues.
On March 3, various parts of the department began placing probationary employees on administrative leave in preparation to fire them. Though Hegseth assured the public that the cuts would only target poor performers, a memo from his interim personnel boss said only that the targeted employees’ “continued employment at the Department would not be in the public interest.”
The memo does not say how long employees will be on leave before they receive official notice of their terminations, but information provided to lawmakers by the Pentagon in early March indicated that notifications would come within 14 to 21 days.
The Pentagon did not respond to questions about the number of employees targeted for firing, how many exemptions were granted, or whether all those targeted had documented performance or conduct issues.
One DOD civilian who spoke with Defense One questioned whether targeting probationary employees made sense, given that the Department of Government Efficiency—the White House advisory board pushing for workforce cuts—purports to be looking for poor performers and trying to save money.
In their organization, they said, the new guys tend to be the most productive.
“And that’s who we’re firing? Our lowest-paid, most efficient, highly motivated employees who aren’t jaded yet? It’s infuriating,” they said.
Others said the new and coming cuts would come on top of years of added work without commensurate staffing increases. (The total federal workforce, most of whom work for DOD or or Veterans Affairs, has remained around 0.6% of the U.S. population for the past decade, according to the Partnership for Public Service.)
“Understaffing was so rampant already – ‘do more with less’ has been a thing since at least the early 2000s,” an Army civilian told Defense One.
Federal law mandates that DOD reductions in force—layoffs like the ones implied by Hegseth’s announced 5-to-8-percent cut—start with “appropriate analysis of the impacts of such reductions on workload, military force structure, lethality, readiness, operational effectiveness, stress on the military force, and fully burdened costs.”
The Pentagon declined to answer whether that review is underway, and whether the new weekly five-bullet-points email will inform the cuts.
On Friday, Hegseth announced that writing these email messages, a task invented by DOGE leader Elon Musk, would be an ongoing requirement at DOD, creating a new administrative burden while terrifying some employees that their job security might be tied to their responses. Other federal agencies have not elected to require their workers to write such emails.
“Therefore, I spent hours last Monday drafting the bullets and trying to tie them to SecDef priorities and statutory requirements,” the Air Force civilian said. “This task and the anxious cloud of uncertainty prevented me from being as focused on my actual job as I used to be.”
Deferred-resignation limbo
And then there are the civilians who have indicated they’d like to depart under a novel Trump-administration deal but aren’t seeing any follow-through.
In January, DOGE sent out an email offering about eight months of pay and benefits for civilians who voluntarily resigned by Feb. 6, a deferred resignation that would officially terminate their employment at the end of September.
Advocacy groups quickly urged employees not to take the deal, as the Office of Personnel Management didn’t have the legal authority to offer it.
The Pentagon declined to say how many of its employees applied and how many were accepted, but some who jumped at the chance are still waiting to hear if they’ve been approved.
One department civilian, who describes themselves as a Republican and a supporter of President Trump and Musk’s efforts to cut the federal workforce, told Defense One they believe their own position wasn’t necessary and so put in for the deal.
“Met all the ‘drop dead’ deadlines yet here I still sit, working away because the Department of Defense has not conducted the analysis needed to move this along,” they said.
In the meantime, the Pentagon announced its other cuts—those of probationary employees and its search for others in the larger workforce—offering no guarantees that those who opted for deferred resignation wouldn’t just be fired while they waited for approval.
“Can you say proverbial limbo? I am trying to leave and can’t,” the civilian said. “My life is on hold. I cannot put my house on the market, cannot make plans for moving or my future until I know when I will be released.”
Another DOD civilian told Defense One that they learned after applying for the resignation that their position is considered mission-critical and so is barred from the plan. An appeal to leadership was denied.
The civilian said their impression was that in the face of larger cuts coming, it wouldn’t look good for the organization to have lost anyone to voluntary resignation, and would make them more vulnerable to deeper cuts.
“There could be a view that once you let one person go, it’s okay to let two people go,” they said.
But they’re still applying for other jobs, they said, and the hiring freeze means they won’t be replaced when they do eventually leave.
Travel, training, testing – all frozen
The department plunged thousands of civilians into another kind of limbo on Thursday, releasing memos that have suspended government travel cards and reduced government purchase cards to a $1 limit, with narrow exemptions for “military operations,” “disaster relief,” and moves for new positions already in process.
The freeze forced civilians on official travel to return home as soon as feasible, including any who were attending mandated training, and cancel any planned travel.
“Everything is already paid for and now costs are going to be through the roof with flight changes,” the Army civilian said. “The schoolhouse has to pay for the hotel whether we stay or leave.”
The training will be continued virtually, the civilian added. The freeze also hits testing and development efforts, a Navy civilian data scientist said.
“Our team is no longer able to travel to support critical testing at another site,” said the civilian, who had travel scheduled starting March 8.. “We have been developing a software program that would streamline our testing process, and now we can no longer travel to the location where it would be deployed to install it.”
The Pentagon did not respond to questions about whether these are intended consequences of the charge-card freezes or if they are taking steps to remedy these issues.
“This would be a year of effort wasted if we are not able to support that travel,” the civilian said.
And then there are the civilians who were planning permanent change-of-station, or PCS, moves, breaking their leases and un-enrolling their kids from school as they waited to get their official orders. Traditionally, new housing, school and other services are set up ahead of time, so that a civilian can move immediately once orders are cut.
“I have coworkers that are now in a ‘holding pattern’ to PCS because they didn’t have orders by [March 5] with SecDef’s travel freeze,” a department civilian said. “Unsure about their kids’ schooling, can’t move forward with the PCS process – super demoralizing.”
Why so hasty?
All of the chaos has left people wondering what kind of efficiency DOGE hopes to extract by terrorizing and then cutting the workforce.
“In classified work, there is no ‘more efficient’ way to do it. You need humans for security,” the Army civilian said. “But this government doesn’t care at all about that. Just break the system, downsize, and then figure it out later.”
The cruelty may be part of the point. Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget in both Trump administrations and an author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, said as much in a 2023 speech about plans to increase White House control of the Pentagon and other federal agencies.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said, as reported by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
The idea is part of a larger push, he said, to bring federal agencies to heel by demonizing experts who have devoted their lives to public service.
“We want to put them in trauma,” he said.
Asked whether the anxiety among the DOD workforce was an intended consequence of these policies, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said that “as we take these important steps to reshape the workforce to meet the President’s priorities, the Department will treat our workers with dignity and respect as it always does. Those who commit themselves to defending our nation deserve nothing less.”
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