The department shed 78,000 civilian employees in 2025 through a mix of voluntary resignations, involuntary layoffs, and a hiring freeze that produced nearly 60,000 fewer new hires than in recent years.
Scale and mechanics of the reductions
The Pentagon's workforce changes unfolded rapidly and unevenly. Defense leaders first announced plans to cut 5 to 8 percent of the civilian workforce; within a year that figure “swelled to about 110,000—about 14 percent of DOD civilians,” the GAO reported. That larger total included laid-off probationary employees, deferred resignations, and voluntary early retirements. At the same time, some 30,000 people were hired for a short list of jobs exempted from the hiring freeze, which the report says put the net loss at just over 10 percent.
The GAO also quantified the immediate operational mechanism behind the reduction: a hiring freeze that resulted in nearly 60,000 fewer new hires than in recent years, combined with voluntary and involuntary departures that together produced the reported losses.
GAO: no consistent analysis and no plan to learn
Congressional auditors were blunt. “But we found that DOD didn’t consistently analyze the impacts of these reductions, either in 2025 or in prior years,” the GAO wrote. The report adds that “DOD also doesn’t have a plan to assess lessons learned from its 2025 workforce reductions.”
The watchdog further found that DOD had not provided guidance for when and how to conduct and document the types of analysis that would show the effects of cuts, and it reported that the Pentagon “didn’t plan to assess how the cuts affected productivity.” Those conclusions identify both a gap in process and a gap in evidence: large personnel changes were implemented without a consistent, documented assessment of their consequences.
Components that did not explain cuts to Congress: Joint Staff, DTRA, Defense Contract Audit Agency
Of the 28 Defense agencies, offices, and other organizations targeted for workforce cuts in the fiscal 2026 budget request, the GAO found at least three components did not provide required explanations to Congress about why and how cuts would be made. Those components, named in the report, were the Joint Staff, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency.
The absence of those submissions to Congress is a concrete example the GAO uses to illustrate uneven compliance with statutory or regulatory requirements for notification and justification tied to workforce reductions.
Defense officials concurred — but gave no implementation timeline
In their response to the GAO report, Defense officials agreed with the thrust of the recommendation: they should “develop and implement a plan for collecting and sharing lessons learned from the Department's implementation of workforce reduction efforts.” The response, however, did not include a timeline or clear indication of when—or whether—that plan will be produced and executed.
That formal concurrence confirms the department sees merit in the GAO’s finding, but the absence of a commitment to action leaves an open question about accountability and follow-through.
What this means for civilian employees, Congress, and defense managers
- Civilian employees: Morale appears strained. A March survey from the Partnership for Public Service, cited by the GAO report, found morale among DOD employees has “tanked” under the current administration. The survey reported that 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,” a figure the survey described as the most satisfied of any large agency but still very low in absolute terms.
- Congress: Oversight is hampered when required explanations are missing. At least three named components did not provide the explanations to Congress that the GAO says were required, leaving lawmakers with less documentation to evaluate the rationale and expected effects of the cuts.
- Defense managers: The GAO found DOD “had not provided guidance for when and how to conduct and document this analysis,” and that the department did not plan to assess productivity effects. Defense officials agreed a lessons-learned plan is needed, which places the immediate burden on managers to design and implement a standard approach to analyzing future workforce actions.
The GAO’s central finding is stark: large-scale personnel reductions were executed without consistent analysis of their impacts and with no plan in hand to harvest lessons from the experience. Defense officials have acknowledged the need to change course, but the record in the report stops short of a deadline or concrete steps. With more than 100,000 personnel movements counted in a year and a net civilian reduction just over 10 percent, the unanswered question is whether the department will move from agreement to action—and when it will be able to demonstrate the effects of decisions already made.
