The Defense Department plans to offer a new round of voluntary resignations and early retirements to the civilian workforce, but how it will go about this is unclear.<\/p>\n
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a new memo that orders the Defense Department\u2019s top personnel official to \u201cimmediately\u201d offer retirement to all eligible civilian employees and open a deferred resignation program,\u00a0DefenseScoop<\/a>\u00a0first reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the memo, signed Friday but released to defense officials Monday, Hegseth said that \u201cexemptions should be rare,\u201d as the intent is to \u201cmaximize participation\u201d so the Pentagon can minimize the number of firings \u201cthat may be required to achieve the strategic objectives.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The memo does not specify what any retirement or resignation offers would entail or how many of the Pentagon\u2019s 900,000-person civilian workforce will receive them.<\/p>\n The move comes as defense leaders are looking to axe tens of thousands of the military\u2019s civilian employees and reinvest the savings elsewhere \u2014 part of a broader effort by billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency to greatly reduce the federal workforce and shutter an unknown number of agencies.<\/p>\n Nearly 21,000 DOD civilian workers have already taken a voluntary resignation buyout earlier this year, which Pentagon officials referred to as a \u201cFork in the Road\u201d offer, and are leaving in the coming months.<\/p>\n