The Pentagon is preparing to trim the fat. Liberals have been perennial whiners about the Defense Department’s budget—watch them complain about the thousands of layoffs that are being planned right now. The Pentagon purge is about to begin, with at least 5,000 layoffs (via WaPo):
WATCH: A mass purge is underway tonight at the Pentagon with President Trump firing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown, and Secretary Hegseth firing several high-ranking officials at the DOD.
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) February 22, 2025
Trump says Lieutenant General Dan "Razin" Caine will… pic.twitter.com/ybjQ4DqMGH
The Pentagon said Friday it will fire about 5,400 civilian employees beginning next week in an “initial” purge to its workforce, as President Donald Trump’s hastily issued orders to shake up the Defense Department faced new scrutiny and officials scrambled to understand how such actions could affect national security.
The announcement followed a day of uncertainty, as administration officials paused a plan to begin firings now while evaluating requests to retain thousands of other employees deemed essential. A senior Pentagon official, Darin Selnick, said in a statement late Friday that the Trump administration intends to cull its workforce by between 5 and 8 percent. With more than 900,000 civilian employees in the Defense Department, tens of thousands of people could be forced out eventually.
Echoing a pronouncement made earlier by Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, Selnick said in his statement that “it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical.”
[…]
The cuts will come after Trump administration officials, coordinating with billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, have slashed thousands of employees elsewhere in the government as part of the president’s broad effort to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
The Defense Department’s civilian worker purge is beginning with probationary employees, those who have one to three years of experience or who recently were promoted, according to officials familiar with the matter, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. That pool of people numbers between 50,000 and 55,000, officials said.
After deliberations over the last day, the Pentagon has settled on firing about 10 percent of the probational employees, a defense official familiar with the effort said. A hiring freeze is expected to take hold next week, and administration officials plan to spend two to three months analyzing who else could be ousted, the official said.
The only downside to this is that there’s going to be an even larger pool for CNN and others to tap into regarding this inflated and inaccurate narrative that firing unnecessary government workers will lead to societal collapse.
No one cares about their concerns. Government employment was never meant to come with permanent job security. Second, millions of working families have dealt with layoffs, so spare us the sob stories. Welcome to life. Welcome to the party. People get fired, and CNN or CBS News did not interview most.
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