After firing thousands of "probationary employees" at various federal departments, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has arrived at the largest of them all -- the Department of Defense -- and is expected to unleash a mass termination as early as this week.
On Tuesday, DOGE staffers were reportedly at the Pentagon and being given lists of probationary employees in compliance with an end-of-business-day deadline. That term generally applies to any federal employee who's in the first one or two years of their current position, regardless of whether they've held other roles before taking their current one. During the probationary period, employees generally can be fired without any privilege of appeal.
Though it's not clear how many DOD employees are probationary, the Pentagon has about 950,000 civilian employees in all. Along with the lists of probationary employees, officials were also asked to identify any employees they wanted to spare, and provide a justification. However, according to the Washington Post's sources, few exceptions are expected to be made. The mass termination may happen by the end of this week. Uniformed service members are exempt.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has embraced the coming cuts. “There are waste, redundancies and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed,” he said last week. “There’s just no doubt.”
Given the sheer scale of the DOD, and the enormous variety of roles, DOGE may take a little extra time to parse the layoff candidates. Last week, the DOGE probationary-employee axe accidentally hit hundreds of Department of Energy employees who work with nuclear warheads. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) raced to reverse the terminations.
One sensitive function of the DOD is its enormous hospital and health care system. Suddenly terminating doctors, nurses and therapists would obviously be catastrophic. However, when firing probationary employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs -- which runs its own vast medical system -- DOGE tread very lightly: Only 1,000 of more than 43,000 probationary VA employees were cut.
Last week, President Trump said he'd like to pursue a summit with Chinese President Xii and Russian President Vladimir Putin, with a goal of agreeing to slash each country's military budget in half. “We’re spending the money against each other, and we could spend that money for better purpose if we get along,” he said. “And I’ll tell you, I think that something like that will happen.”
According to the New York Times, here are the approximate numbers of probationary employees already let go at several other federal departments:
- Agriculture: 4,200
- Interior: 2,300
- Health and Human Services: 1,900
- Energy: 1,000
The DOGE campaign against federal waste got a shot in the arm on Monday, when Obama-appointed US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan denied an emergency filing to block DOGE's access to federal records and government layoffs - saying in a 10-page decision that the 14 states who brought the lawsuit have failed to meet the burden of proof to prove "imminent, irreparable harm.