The Space Force is losing nearly 14 percent of its civilian workers—about 780 people—due to the Trump administration’s effort to dramatically cut the federal workforce, the service’s chief said Tuesday.
Initiatives such as early retirement and voluntary-resignation programs have had an “outsized impact” on the youngest service, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Tuesday during a Senate Armed Service committee hearing.
Civilians comprise about 5,600, or more than one-third, of the service’s 17,000 people.
“Total reductions have been almost 14 percent of our civilian workforce inside the Space Force,” Saltzman said.
That number is higher than the 10 percent Space Force officials previously expected to take.
And both numbers suggest that the Space Force is losing proportionally more civilians than the rest of the Defense Department, which Secretary Pete Hegseth is working to cut by five to eight percent—a process that has caused widespread uncertainty and fear among federal employees.
The loss of civilians is a “large hit,” Saltzman said, since the service heavily relies on civilian expertise in the acquisition community to buy new systems and platforms for the service.
“I’m worried about replacing that level of expertise in the near term as we try to resolve it and make sure we have a good workforce doing that acquisition,” he said.
By the end of this year, the Space Force will fall short of its civilian staffing goal by nearly 1,000 personnel, Saltzman said, because so many employees are taking the deferred-resignation offer and because the service is halting its phase of “managed growth.”
“The DOD is really looking at what the size of the civilian workforce is, and so if those incentives to reshape the workforce affect the Space Force, I’m not sure exactly where we’re going to end up, what our final size is going to be. As soon as I understand what that size is, then we will redistribute, and reallocate this for,” he said.
These workforce reductions come as the Space Force is taking on new roles and more missions, including preparing for offensive and defense operations in space, and helping construct the new Golden Dome architecture.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., ranking member of SASC, cautioned that the service won’t be able to buy systems and take over these new missions if it doesn’t have the people: “We’re not going to do all these great scientific and developmental and modernization issues without these critical workers.”
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