The Pentagon said on Friday that it would fire 5,400 civilian probationary workers starting next week, in the first of what officials say will likely be a wave of much larger layoffs at the Defense Department, the government’s biggest agency.
“We anticipate reducing the department’s civilian work force by 5 to 8 percent to produce efficiencies and refocus the department on the president’s priorities and restoring readiness in the force,” Darin Selnick, a senior Defense Department personnel official, said in a statement.
The department has more than 945,000 civilian employees. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said 17 specific missions, such as military operations at the southwestern border, would be exempt from the 8 percent cuts in the defense budget he has ordered for each of the next five years.
Senior Pentagon supervisors were told this week to expect the department to fire about 55,000 civilian workers worldwide, part of a push by President Trump and Elon Musk to drastically reduce the size of the federal work force.
The coming dismissals announced on Friday appear to be the first tranche, and target the easiest employees to fire. Workers on probation do not receive the same protections that many other federal employees have. Probationary periods tend to last a year but can be longer for certain positions.
Mr. Selnick’s statement said that the department would institute a hiring freeze while officials conducted “further analysis of our personnel needs.”
“It is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical,” he said.
Some Defense Department supervisors have criticized the looming personnel cuts as a hasty, ill-conceived move that could damage the department’s future.