'This Is Going to Be a Challenge': Service Officials Detail Fallout from Civilian Resignations Pushed by Trump
Civilian Airman Nicholas Holland, left, a photographer
assigned to the 673rd Air Base Wing Public Affairs, helps Army
Private Juan Pacheco, a replacement in the 11th Airborne Division,
adjust his uniform before having his official Individual Readiness Processing
Program photograph taken at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson,
Alaska, March 14, 2025. (Justin Connaher/U.S. Air Force)
Posted: May 2, 2025 --- Military.com | By Rebecca
Kheel and Drew
F. Lawrence
Published May 01, 2025, at 12:01pm ET
The military services are poised to lose thousands of their civilian employees to the Trump administration's push for them to resign and are bracing for effects on pay processing systems, child care and more, personnel officials for each of the services told lawmakers. About 16,000 Army civilians, 1,600 Marine Corps civilians and 12,000 Air Force civilians took the administration's deferred resignation offer, officers from those services said at a House Armed Services Committee personnel subcommittee hearing.
About 10% of Space Force civilians -- or about 500 people -- also took the offer, the service witness said. The Navy witness did not have a service wide number, but said about 10% of the civilians in his personnel office took the offer. "I can probably speak for everybody here that civilians maintain an important role for us, for our readiness, for our continuity," Lieutenant General Brian Eifler, the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, said at the hearing.
Read Next: Military Zone Along Border Means New -- Potentially
Harsher -- Penalties for Newly Detained Migrants
The Trump administration has focused a large portion of
its first 100 days on slashing the size of the federal government through
hiring freezes, mass firings and resignation offers. Pentagon officials have
said their goal is to cut about 5% to 8% of the department's workforce -- or
about 50,000 to 60,000 jobs that include thousands of veterans.
As the firings have run into lawsuits and other hurdles, the administration has been relying more heavily on the resignations in order to meet its target of shedding tens of thousands of employees. The deferred resignation program was originally offered in January when billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), office sent its infamous "Fork in the Road" email to all federal employees. The program allows government workers to leave their jobs while still getting paid until October.
The Pentagon reopened its deferred resignation offer last
month, giving civilian employees until mid-April to decide to leave or risk
getting fired later. With the resignations fresh and reshuffling still being
worked out to cover any holes, the service officials told lawmakers on
Wednesday that they were still analyzing exactly what vacancies there will be
and what functions might be hit.
But some offered examples of where they are most worried
about staffing gaps. "I am very concerned about my force development
pipeline, how it will affect the schoolhouses and how it will affect our pay
systems going forward, depending on how that shakes out," said Vice Admiral
Rick Cheeseman, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Personnel.
"We've done a lot of work in the last two years in modernizing our pay systems. We're in a much better place. We are, as far as I'm concerned, the gold standard in terms of getting pay transactions done and taking care of sailors. I don't want to see any impact at all, and we'll be paying attention to that to make sure we mitigate appropriately." Lieutenant General Caroline Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Manpower and Personnel for the Air Force, expressed concern that the uncertainty over job stability could cause some ripple effects on recruiting employees in the future.
Miller also later noted that some child-care services have already been curtailed because
of the hiring freeze and the 1st round of deferred resignations at
the beginning of the year. "We've had to shift some of our staffing in our
child and youth programs into CDCs just to make sure that the CDCs are
covered," she said, referring to child development centers.
"We're working through, as we get to the summer,
there's a lot of child and youth programs that we may have to decrease the
hours available." While the total number of civilians resigning from the
Marines and Space Force is small compared to the other services, officials from
those branches warned that the resignations will have an outsized effect on
them since the branches are small.
"We're a third civilians of a total force of 17,000,
so the impact of losing civilians is exponentially hard on the Space
Force," said Katharine Kelley, deputy chief of space operations for human
capital. "We have to look very carefully at how to mitigate that 10% and
how to be very, very intentional about making sure that that does not have a
direct mission impact.
I will tell you, because we rely heavily upon the Air Force for support and that the preponderance of our Guardians, military and civilian, are operationally focused, this is going to be a challenge." At a service expo in Washington, D.C., this week, Marine Corps officials also spoke about the resignations affecting their units. Lieutenant General James Adams, the Marine Corps Deputy Commandant for programs and resources, noted they were not evenly distributed and that civilian-heavy entities such as installations, logistics and systems commands took disproportionate hits.
Lieutenant General Benjamin Watson, the Commanding General
of the service's training and education entity, also said at the expo Wednesday
that while his element is still mission capable, "the most challenging
thing about it is the unpredictable nature of who takes the buyout."
"That's the reconciliation we're going through right now to figure out, how do we maintain mission accomplishment capability with the workforce that we have?" Adams said, noting that the Pentagon-wide hiring freeze is also contributing to that calculus. "You combine those things together, the workforce is shrinking and potentially to the point where we need to adjust billets across the enterprise to be able to accomplish missions," he said.
