The dangers of Hegseth’s overly hasty Pentagon personnel review

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum on March 28 announcing that he would “realign the size of our civilian workforce and strategically restructure it to supercharge our American warfighters."

He went on to write that “an honest analysis will reveal opportunities to consolidate duplicative functions, reject excessive bureaucracy and implement technological solutions that automate tasks, particularly at the headquarters level. The net effect will be a reduction in the number of civilian full-time equivalent positions.”

To this end, Hegseth has charged the under secretary for Personnel and Readiness to offer early retirement to eligible civilian employees at the Department of Defense. There is no confirmed under secretary, however — only an official "performing the duties" of under secretary.

Traditionally, officials serving in this capacity tend to be reticent about taking any bold actions that might cause them problems once their Senate-confirmed boss takes office. Their safest route is merely to rubberstamp whatever document their staff produces. How eager the current acting under secretary will be to identify and then press officials to take early retirement is therefore rather uncertain.

There is much to commend Hegseth’s objectives. Between 2007 (when the U.S. was at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan) and 2024, when America was not involved in a major conflict, the department increased its civilian personnel rolls by 137,000. There are undoubtedly far too many civilians working at the Defense Department, and that personnel reductions are very much in order.

The difficulty with Hegseth’s plan is that he has given the heads of military departments (there is only an acting secretary of the Air Force), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (a role that the vice chairman currently fills) and other top Pentagon officials, several of whom have yet to be confirmed by the Senate, less than two weeks to complete what he terms “required analysis.” He calls for the analysis to “include functional areas, consolidate management hierarchy, and position titles and counts [that are] clearly depicted.” And the acting under secretary for Personnel is to submit all of this by April 11.

There is simply no way to complete a thorough analysis in such a short timeframe, even if it is only “initial” and would be subject to further review and amendment.

The so-called analysis resembles nothing more than a budget “cut-drill.” These exercises are the bane of departmental programmers and budgeteers who work tirelessly to produce a balanced program that meets White House top-line requirements.

“Cut-drills” can sometimes be conducted in as little as a weekend. They rarely involve serious analysis. Instead, they invariably target new programs that do not interest either military or civilian officials who are unfamiliar with them, or designate programs that officials realistically expect Congress to restore. The latter are termed “gold watches.”

To put it another way, “cut drills” do not achieve their intended objective of identifying wasteful or duplicative programs.

The current personnel exercise could well yield similar unhelpful results. Officials whom their superiors may dislike, or be biased against for whatever reason, or who, for their part, feel that they are unwanted, could be pressed to take early retirement, no matter how capable they are.

Others may choose to retire because they are talented enough to move to private sector jobs that are likely to pay them much more than their government salaries.

The great danger is that those who choose to stay on will be the mediocre time-servers who have spent their careers checking the right boxes and who should be forced out, but who will use their bureaucratic skills — perhaps the only skills they have — to survive the purge.

At the same time, hasty analysis will consolidate offices without sufficient investigation to determine how much their activities really overlap. Numbers will be reduced without analyzing the role of each official in a given office. Activities that seem to demand lower priority will be done away with, while others will be cut in the expectation that Congress will restore them — the “gold watch” effect.

The Pentagon would do well to give senior officials more time, especially those who are so new to their jobs that they invariably will rely on lower-level staffers whose objectives could well be far different from their own — or, for that matter, those of the Secretary of Defense.

Giving top officials perhaps six months to complete a preliminary review, based as much on their perceptions of how their staffs operate as on the views of their subordinates, would serve the secretary and his deputy — to whom the under secretary is to provide the initial proposal — far more effectively. And by that time, Congress may well have confirmed the new under secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, who would have far more clout when taking charge of the entire effort.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.