Pentagon leaders cut their department’s workforce by more than 10 percent with little regard for the effects—and still has no plans to assess them, according to a congressional watchdog report released on Friday.
The department shed 78,000 civilian employees in 2025 through a mix of voluntary resignations, involuntary layoffs, and a hiring freeze that resulted in nearly 60,000 fewer new hires than in recent years, the report found.
“But we found that DOD didn’t consistently analyze the impacts of these reductions, either in 2025 or in prior years,” according to the report. “DOD also doesn’t have a plan to assess lessons learned from its 2025 workforce reductions.”
In their response to the report, Defense officials agreed that they should “develop and implement a plan for collecting and sharing lessons learned from the Department’s implementation of workforce reduction efforts.”
The officials did not indicate whether that would happen.
Soon after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took office, the Pentagon announced it would cut 5 to 8 percent of its civilian workforce. Within a year, the number swelled to about 110,000—about 14 percent of DOD civilians—including laid-off probationary employees, deferred resignations, and voluntary early retirements. Some 30,000 people were hired for a short list of jobs exempted from the hiring freeze, putting the net loss at just over 10 percent.
Of the 28 Defense agencies, offices, and other organizations targeted for workforce cuts by the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget request, at least three did not give the required explanation to Congress about why and how the cuts would be made, GAO found.
Those were the Joint Staff, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency, according to the report.
“According to component officials, DOD had not provided guidance for when and how to conduct and document this analysis,” the GAO found.
And further, the GAO found, the Pentagon didn’t plan to assess how the cuts affected productivity.
In March, the Partnership for Public Service published a survey that found morale among DOD employees has tanked during the current administration.
Only 9 percent of Army Department employees agreed that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s political leadership team generates high levels of motivation in the workforce,” the survey found, the most satisfied of any of the large government agencies surveyed.
