The Pentagon is considering dismissing more than 5,000 civilian workers if sequestration continues into the coming fiscal year — which begins Oct. 1 — according to internal documents obtained by Bloomberg.
The Pentagon’s current budget request — $526.6 billion — would face a 10 percent reduction because of continued sequestration cuts. The documents said to plan for a $475 billion budget, reached through 16 percent downgrade in procurement and research spending and a 12 percent reduction in the operations, maintenance and military construction budget.
The documents came from the draft of a presentation Pentagon budget analysts gave to generals and admirals managing each service’s resources, according to Bloomberg.
Previously, the most detailed sequester plan the Pentagon had publicly released, was a four-month Strategic Choices and Management review. While addressing a sequester approach to some issues — active-duty military size, number of air fleets and carrier ships, changes in benefits — it did not directly address civilian workforce changes.
But the newly uncovered documents do just that. They proposed to eliminate 2,100 positions from the Army’s 263,900-person civilian workforce and 2,672 positions from the Navy’s 214,000-person civilian workforce. Departmentwide agencies would also lose 1,500 people from the 137,000-person civilian workforce. Most of those cuts would come from the Defense Contract Management Agency.
Several of the military’s marquee construction programs would avoid budgetary pain, though. The redundantly delayed Lockheed Martin F-35 — part of the “costliest weapons program in human history” — would retain funding, as would the Boeing KC-46 mid-air refueling plane. The Navy would also maintain all of its 2014 contracts for vessels, already funded under previous legislative action.
The Pentagon declined to comment directly on the specifics of the cuts proposed in the documents.