'This Is Going to Be a Challenge': Service Officials Detail Fallout from Civilian Resignations Pushed by Trump

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 on Wednesday.

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 servicewide 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," Lt. Gen. Brian Eifler, the Army's deputy chief of staff for personnel, said at the hearing.

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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, or 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 school houses and how it will affect our pay systems going forward, depending on how that shakes out," said Vice Adm. 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."

Lt. Gen. 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 first 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. Lt. Gen. 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.

Lt. Gen. 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.

Related: Pentagon Civilians Again Told They Can Resign Now, or Face Potential Firings in the Future