With two opportunities to apply for a deferred resignation and a hiring freeze in effect for all but the civilian career fields deemed most critical, the Defense Department is working toward successfully implementing its workforce acceleration and recapitalization initiative using voluntary reductions in force.
The initiative, announced March 28, 2025, in a memorandum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is part of a larger plan to rebuild the U.S. military to meet current and future demands.
"To deliver on my commitment to urgently rebuild our military, revive the warrior ethos and deliver maximum deterrence, we must aggressively refocus every available resource towards our core mission," Hegseth said. "We will realign the size of our civilian workforce and strategically restructure it to supercharge our American warfighters consistent with my interim National Defense Strategy guidance."
With 900,000-plus civilian employees across the department, the initiative requires not just moving civilian employees around from one agency to another to maximize the workforce but also, in some cases, reduce that workforce.
Tim Dill, performing the duties of the deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said the department has achieved most of its workforce resizing efforts using voluntary separations, particularly through two deferred resignation programs and a hiring freeze.
"The majority of the civilian workforce optimization initiatives have been voluntary measures," he said. "We've been asking, 'Are there people that would like to take paid leave and move on to something else, whether it's a new job or retirement?'"
In his messages to the workforce, the defense secretary said he wants to make reduction decisions as voluntary as possible to minimize the need for involuntary separations later on. So far, Dill said the department has not made a decision regarding a reduction in force, a process through which the department could involuntarily lay off civil servants.
In late January 2025, the Office of Personnel Management offered a federal governmentwide Deferred Resignation Program, which was available for two weeks. Under that program, federal employees could volunteer to resign from their positions, but continue to get paid until the end of September.
The department also offered its own DRP, billed as "DRP 2.0," available April 7-14.
Under both DRPs, eligible employees were also offered Voluntary Early Retirement Authority, which allowed those employees to begin collecting retirement pay earlier than normal. Dill said some employees were also able to combine the two, accepting DRP and retirement, and might get paid on administrative leave until December.
"So that's almost a full year of administrative leave," he said. "It's a very attractive and generous offer for those that might have been thinking about leaving the department."
The department is now reviewing the effects of the second DRP.
"There is a lot of data to review, and there is a lot of mission analysis that goes into that for each of the military departments and components to look at where the concentrations of volunteering employees are," he said. "For example, you might have a critical air traffic control function in one area where you know that you don't need to retain every air traffic controller at that location. But could you let all of them take the DRP?"
Dill said the two DRPs were used to meet department needs rather than entirely driven by employees' personal choices. This is because the department isn't just looking to reduce numbers in general, it's looking to shape the workforce to optimize it for the future.
With both DRPs, the department and military services could deny an employee's request to take the offer if the department or service deemed it wasn't in their best interest.
"The department gave the services and components the ability to review each DRP request and decide whether they could afford to let that employee participate without an impact on mission-critical functions," he said.
During the second DRP, Dill said even more consideration was given to which groups of employees the delayed resignation should be offered to. At the same time, they continued to retain approval authority to determine if an employee who volunteered would be allowed to take it.
"The secretary has given guidance that exceptions to DRP should be rare," Dill said. "We want to maximize participation, but at the same time, we need to mitigate risk and ensure that we don't allow participation where it [will] harm the department's readiness or effectiveness."
Early on in his second administration, President Donald J. Trump implemented a governmentwide hiring freeze, and that's still true today within the Defense Department.
In the past, DOD typically hired about 6,000 people each month to fill vacancies left by retirements and other kinds of employee attrition. With a hiring freeze in place, the gaps in civilian employment are growing, reducing the size of the civilian workforce across the department.
That reduction in the workforce is not random; it's targeted. However, the hiring freeze is not universal, as the department has exempted jobs it considers critical to the future workforce, such as those related to immigration enforcement, national security, public safety, shipyards, depots, cyber fields and medical treatment facilities.
"We never stopped bringing in new people to help the department achieve its goals," Dill said. "We are bringing in employees right now, but far fewer employees than we would bring in [typically]."
Last month, the secretary also ordered the military departments, the Joint Chiefs, directors of defense agencies and others to submit plans that include proposed future functional areas, consolidated management hierarchies, position titles and counts. Dill said those plans have since been submitted, and the department is now analyzing the requested input to develop a future workforce.
"That's getting down even more into the technical details and further analysis on how we would get to that future-state organizational chart, and looking across the department and synchronizing each of those moves," he said.
The review will identify functions that are no longer needed or duplicative and can be eliminated. Dill said an effort would be made to retain employees who can be used elsewhere to serve the department.
"We want to make sure that talented employees that have chosen to remain with the department are placed where their skills are best focused on the missions that we face today and not on some legacy requirement or mission," he said.
Regarding probationary employees, Dill said the department had as many as 55,000 in January 2025, and since then, about 10% — 5,400 — have been dismissed. A probationary employee is one who, in most cases, has not yet been a federal employee for a full year.
Dill said the department faced some legal pushback, and some of those employees have been brought back into service, adding that DOD will continue to have a sizable civilian workforce.
While the department continues to realign and shape its civilian workforce, Dill said he appreciates those committed to the mission and supporting the warfighters.
"They've twice signaled their desire to remain in the department when they had an opportunity to take paid leave and depart," he said. "We're glad they are still here, and we're excited to make sure that we match their skill sets against the most critical needs of the department."