Pentagon to fire 5400 civilian employees in ‘initial’ purge

The Pentagon said Friday it will fire about 5400 civilian employees beginning next week in an “initial” purge to its workforce, as President Donald Trump’s hastily issued orders to shake up the Defense Department faced new scrutiny and officials scrambled to understand how such actions could affect national security.

The announcement followed a day of uncertainty, as administration officials paused a plan to begin firings now while evaluating requests to retain thousands of other employees deemed essential. A senior Pentagon official, Darin Selnick, said in a statement late Friday that the Trump administration intends to cull its workforce by between 5 and 8 percent. With more than 900,000 civilian employees in the Defense Department, tens of thousands of people could be forced out eventually.

Echoing a pronouncement made earlier by Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, Selnick said in his statement that “it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical.”

“Taxpayers deserve to have us take a thorough look at our workforce top-to-bottom to see where we can eliminate redundancies,” Selnick added. The cuts are necessary, he said, “to produce efficiencies and refocus” the Pentagon on Trump’s national security priorities.

The cuts will come after Trump administration officials, coordinating with billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, have slashed thousands of employees elsewhere in the government as part of the president’s broad effort to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.

The Defense Department’s civilian worker purge is beginning with probationary employees, those who have one to three years of experience or who recently were promoted, according to officials familiar with the matter, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. That pool of people numbers between 50,000 and 55,000, officials said.

After deliberations over the last day, the Pentagon has settled on firing about 10 percent of the probational employees, a defense official familiar with the effort said. A hiring freeze is expected to take hold next week, and administration officials plan to spend two to three months analyzing who else could be ousted, the official said.

Supervisors throughout the agency, the federal government’s largest, have spent days requesting to the new administration that certain employees should be spared because the work they do is vital to national defense. An email obtained by The Washington Post indicates that Trump officials ultimately decided they need more time to sort through those many cases.

The message, sent Thursday night by Ruth Vetter, a lawyer in the Pentagon general counsel’s office, said that senior officials had informed human resources staff that “they should not initiate removals of probationary employees” on Friday because requests for exemptions citing mission criticality “are still under review.”

Vetter’s email, labeled “PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL,” warned that an employee’s past performance “must be viewed through the current needs and best interest of the government, in light of the President’s directive to dramatically reduce the size of the federal workforce.”

Vetter referred questions to Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Among the agency’s probationary employees are hundreds of teachers who work for the Department of Defense Education Activity, a school system that educates about 67,000 students - mostly the children of service members - at military installations around the globe. One person familiar with the matter said that DoDEA officials are attempting to save teachers from Trump’s purge of the federal workforce, but it was unclear if the effort will be successful. A DoDEA spokesman declined to comment.

© 2025 , The Washington Post