Pentagon failed to assess impact of cuts to civilian workforce, watchdog finds

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) probe has found that the Pentagon failed to evaluate the effects of recent civilian personnel reductions, leaving a substantial gap in understanding for key areas such as “readiness, workload, and lethality.”

Roughly 78,000 civilian positions were eliminated in 2025 — about 10% of a workforce that originally exceeded 793,000. At the time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth characterized the cuts as part of a broader effort to “streamline the Federal workforce and to make the Federal Government more efficient and responsive.”

“Effective immediately and for the duration of this freeze, no vacant civilian position may be filled, and no new civilian positions may be created, unless approved by me,” he wrote in a Feb. 28, 2025 memo.

The Friday report from the GAO — sometimes referred to as Congress’s watchdog — noted that under law, Hegseth “may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels without conducting an appropriate analysis of the impacts.”

It concluded that the department did not have a plan in place to review the impact of the workforce reductions, with the report adding that “without assessing lessons learned, DoD may miss opportunities to better understand reduction impacts, inform strategic human capital management, and mitigate any challenges in future efforts.”

In a statement to Military Times, a Pentagon official said that the department “acknowledges GAO’s recommendations and are actively evaluating the findings.”

The new report amounts to the latest bump in a rocky relationship between the Trump administration and the GAO, however.

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought said last September that the agency “shouldn’t exist,” telling a conservative conference it was a “quasi-legislative independent entity.” In March, Vought issued a memo to department and agency heads stating that the GAO’s views are “not binding,” while contending that excessive deference to them had “failed…to adequately protect American taxpayer dollars.”

But Sarah Kaczmarek, a spokesperson for the GAO, told Military Times that Congress has long-relied on the office “​for fact-based analysis of federal spending and compliance with the law.”