The Air Force and Space Force are asking for funds to hire more than 6,000 civilians in fiscal 2027, a sharp reversal from a year ago when the budget request slashed about 5,700 full-time jobs.
About 70 percent of the new civilian jobs included in the Department of the Air Force’s budget request aim to fill vacancies created by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency commission or related executive orders.
Air & Space Forces Magazine’s analysis last year of civilian personnel funding in the fiscal 2026 budget request found more than 5,700 full-time equivalent job cuts linked to DOGE’s workforce efficiency push. This year, a similar review of the 2027 budget request identified some 4,300 FTE increases citing the same initiatives.
Civilian and military personnel are counted differently in Pentagon budget documents. While military jobs represent specific roles at every rank, civilian jobs are counted based on the cost of a person; thus, one FTE is equivalent to one year of full-time work, according to the Office of Management and Budget. That means two or more part-timers can add up to a single FTE.
A Department of the Air Force spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine that manpower assessments conducted in the past year showed civilian staffing levels are currently “below validated requirements” in modernization, training, cyber, and operational support fields, among others. The budget documents cite the assessments as “comprehensive data-hygiene and manpower-validation efforts.”
The spokesperson said the FTE increases in the fiscal ‘27 request are not a “one-for-one restoration” of jobs vacated through job cutting efforts such as the deferred resignation program, which let government employees resign and then remain on the payroll while searching for new jobs. The DRP triggered 10,691 civilian vacancies across the Air Force and Space Force in 2025.
The department was able to mitigate the impact of last year’s reductions manpower through “workload reprioritization and temporary support measures,” the spokesperson said, but noted that the reduction in funding “created sustained pressure in several mission areas.”
For the Space Force, the proposed FTE increases go beyond plugging prior vacancies, and will help the service double in size over the next several years as it takes on a larger budget and expanded responsibility. Civilians are vital to the Space Force for technical expertise in building and launching space systems, and its fiscal ‘27 budget request calls for adding 1,912 civilian FTEs.
“In the Space Force’s highly specialized mission areas, civilian expertise provides critical technical continuity and operational support,” the spokesperson said.
Likewise, some of the 4,115 civilian additional FTEs the Air Force is seeking will support “specific programmatic initiatives,” including Air Force Junior ROTC, strategic command priorities, and cyber security teams, the spokesperson said.
Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the Air Force and Space Force budget requests reflect a “swing toward reinvesting in the workforce.” It also comes as the Defense Department seeks a record $1.5 trillion in defense spending for fiscal 2027—easing the department’s payroll crunch.
“It’s not so much that they’re calling it out as ‘anti-DOGE,’ but it is swinging back,” he told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Last year the base DOD budget was flat. This year the budget is up. So, they’ve got more money, got more work to do, and so naturally that means they’re going to need more people … to execute that larger budget.”
Workforce Optimization
One of President Donald Trump’s priorities for his second term is a plan to shrink the federal workforce. After his inauguration in January 2025, he ordered a federal hiring freeze and the Office of Management and Budget rolled out the deferred resignation program. Then a February executive order detailed DOGE’s workforce optimization efforts, calling on federal agencies to conduct “large-scale reductions in force” and submit a “data-driven” hiring plan to ensure any new hires came only in the “highest-need areas.”
The next month, the Pentagon said it would cut 5 to 8 percent of its civilian personnel through a combination of deferred resignations, an early retirement program, a hiring freeze, and dismissals of probationary employees.
The Government Accountability Office reported in May that those moves cut the civilian defense workforce by 10 percent, or 78,000 individuals.
The White House couched its job-cutting program as an effort to “restore accountability” and “eliminate waste, bloat, and insularity.” But many agencies found the cuts went too deep.
Further, the GAO report identified inconsistencies in how various Defense Department directives were implemented, noting that the military may not have conducted all of the workforce reduction analysis required by law. GAO recommended the Pentagon plan for “collecting and sharing lessons learned.” DOD concurred, but did not commit to doing so.
Meanwhile, the DAF spokesperson said that, if approved, the department plans to fill all 6,000-plus FTEs in fiscal ‘27, and some organizations have already begun the process. Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of the Space Force’s largest acquisition hub, Space Systems Command, told reporters in April he’d received authorization to start hiring for those positions to ensure the potential influx of new funding can be acted on as soon as it’s available. SSC relies heavily on a largely civilian workforce and suffered an outsized impact during last year’s reductions. Garrant’s goal is to hire 100 new personnel per month to fill close to 1,000 positions, 200 of them new.
It won’t be easy, Harrison noted. Some potential hires may be leery of going to work for the government after a spate of job cuts last year; others may be turned off by the Trump administration’s move to freeze civilian pay in its fiscal 2027 budget request, though that proposal may meet resistance in Congress.
If the freeze holds, and inflation continues at its current pace, that could be a factor in the government’s recruiting efforts, Harrison said. “In real terms, civilian pay is declining,” he said. “The job is becoming less and less attractive to people who have other options.”