Efforts to shrink the size of the civilian workforce across the federal government and within the Pentagon are having a disproportionate effect on the Space Force, according to the service’s top general.
Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told lawmakers Tuesday that the Space Force, the U.S. military’s smallest service, has lost almost 14% of its civilian workforce in recent months, due largely to early retirement and resignation incentives implemented by the Trump administration.
“We understand the desire to reduce the civilian workforce,” Saltzman said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “It’s just having a little bit of an outsized impact on the Space Force.”
The Pentagon wants to cut about 8% of its civilian workforce as part of a broader effort to slash the federal government’s footprint. As of mid-March, the Defense Department had approved 21,000 resignations, and more reductions are expected to come through early retirement incentives and moves to fire a portion of the department’s probationary employees.
The Space Force, established in 2019 during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, has approximately 14,000 members, about 4,000 of which are civilians. As workforce reduction measures started to be implemented earlier this year, service leaders expressed concern about how cuts to Space Force civilians might impact efforts to expand expertise, particularly among its acquisition cadre.
Speaking in early March at the annual Air Force Association conference in Aurora, Colorado, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant called the reduction orders “incredibly challenging” for his team at Space Systems Command, which is responsible for developing and acquiring most of the Space Force’s satellites and ground systems.
“There is a lot of concern,” Garrant said. “As a command and as a commander, we are going to focus on how can we continue to deliver the mission with the human resources that we have.”
Saltzman said this week that the service had been in “a period of managed growth” when the hiring freeze and voluntary resignations started to take effect.
“There was a deficit and we were trying to get to a larger civilian workforce when we were asked to stop,” he said.
During a May 14 House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee hearing, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the Space Force’s acting space acquisition executive, said the service is still assessing the risk of these workforce gaps.
While the service hasn’t had a chance to “fully absorb the numbers” and their impact on the acquisition enterprise, Purdy said organizations like SSC, the Space Development Agency and the service’s innovation arm SpaceWERX are concerned.
“There is, I would say, trouble brewing,” Purdy said. “We’re worried about the numbers.”
During the May 14 hearing, Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., called for a stop to the cuts, blaming the Department of Government Efficiency and billionaire Elon Musk for pushing talented personnel from the service and into the private sector.
“I am sure Mr. Musk has no problem with having more talented people to hire while having lower oversight of his SpaceX contracts,” Moulton said. “But his careless decimation of the Space Force civilian workforce is unacceptable, and we must stop the bleed.”
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
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