Watchdog review sheds new light on DOGE’s downsizing impacts at DOD

The Pentagon’s workforce shrank by roughly 10.7% during the height of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency implementation efforts, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

That decrease represents 82,940 employees — from a baseline 778,188 civilian employees at the Defense Department in December 2024 near the end of the Biden administration, down to 695,248 in January 2026.

Outlining governmentwide workforce contractions across 2025 that were sparked by multiple presidential directives, GAO’s report offers a fresh, data-driven look at DOGE’s downsizing impacts inside the Pentagon.

It indicates that, while DOD remains America’s largest employer of federal civilian personnel, the department’s workforce is now substantially smaller in volume than it was in prior years. 

“A key takeaway for DOD is the role the Deferred Resignation Program played in the agency’s efforts to reduce the size of its civilian workforce,” Dawn Locke, director with GAO’s Strategic Issues team and lead on the review, told DefenseScoop.

At the start of his second administration’s tenure in January 2025, President Donald Trump launched a disruptive campaign for the federal government to uncover “waste, fraud and abuse,” and ultimately slash certain types of spending and personnel positions to enable savings for taxpayers.

Spearheaded by space and tech executive Elon Musk, DOGE teams were hastily deployed at the Pentagon and across other federal agencies to carry out the president’s vision. 

That February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a “strategic reduction” of 5-8% of civilian personnel who worked for the department. 

The cuts and organizational changes inside DOD were to be driven by a mixture of hiring freezes, probationary separations, Reductions in Force (RIFs), and voluntary incentives.

But senior defense officials have been mostly unforthcoming about the full scope of DOGE’s cuts and staffing changes, or how they are affecting military operations — even after Musk’s tenure as a special government employee ended months later, in May 2025.

GAO tracks quarterly data across the 24 Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act agencies to inform Congressional requesters about workforce changes impacting America’s government and economy.

All 22 agencies that provided requested data for 2025 reported having fewer staff at the beginning of 2026 than at the end of 2024, the 111-page review states. 

“Over the course of the year, the total workforce across these agencies declined by nearly 256,000 employees — or over 11 percent,” officials wrote. “This decline represented the net result of about 378,000 employee departures, 127,000 hires, and employees shifting between active and nonpay status.”

GAO also disclosed that “the number of employees who separated from their agencies generally far exceeded the number that agencies hired over the course of 2025.”

DOD was notably one of a handful of federal agencies that also implemented its own agency-specific Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) to accelerate voluntary resignations and retirements among its civilian staff.

In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Monday, Locke said that 59% of DOD personnel who separated in the second half of 2025 accepted a DRP offer, reflecting a total of 46,285 employees.

“[This] is much higher than the governmentwide total of [34%],” Locke explained. “One reason this is important is because employees who took a DRP offer were placed on leave usually for 5 to 9 months, during which they were paid and received benefits but did not work.”

Altogether, agencies reported to GAO that about 129,000 employees separated from the federal government under a DRP during 2025.

GAO’s federal workforce update also presents agencies’ total hires and separations that occurred during specified timeframes — with data broken down to reflect different employee characteristics, including tenure, occupational categories and locations where they worked.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, more than 24,000 — or 43.6% — of employees who separated from DOD were listed in the ‘Technical’ occupational group.

“Examples of positions in the “Technical” operations group can include computer operators, dental assistants, nursing assistants, and data entry specialists. In general, employees in technical positions perform non-routine tasks learned via specialized on-the-job training or vocational programs below college graduation level,” Locke said.

Pentagon spokespersons did not answer questions submitted by DefenseScoop about the GAO report or current state of the workforce by publication.