Civilian mariners and employees who work at the Navy’s public shipyards and maintenance entities are exempt from an ongoing hiring freeze across the Department of Defense, the Navy’s top officer told the Senate on Wednesday.
The sea service is identifying critical personnel who should not get fired in the government-wide effort to reduce civilian headcount, Adm. Jim Kilby, the vice chief of naval operations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee’s readiness and management support subcommittee on Wednesday.
“The shipyards are exempt from the probationary employees and they are exempt from the hiring freeze,” Kilby, who is also performing the duties of the chief of naval operations, told the panel. “So we are trying to shape this in a manner that allows us to continue the most important work as we work through guidance from the administration. Also exempted from the hiring freeze is the Military Sealift Command, an important force for us to maintain our fleet.”
Across the Navy’s four public yards in Virginia, Maine, Hawaii and Washington state, Naval Sea Systems Command employs about 38,000 workers. Out of the total force of 8,100 workers, MSC employs 5,500 civilian mariners.
While the effort to reduce the civilian workforce is ongoing, the Navy is identifying shipyard workers and maintainers as essential to their mission to protect those employees from cuts, a service official told USNI News. A layoff exemption for the shipyards would apply to employees who are probationary due to time, rather than bad conduct or poor performance, the official said.
The first wave of firings is focused on non-essential workers and people who were flagged for poor conduct or performance, USNI News understands. There are two types of probationary employees who can be flagged for cuts. The first category is employees who have been identified as poor performers or as engaging in bad conduct, while the second category includes those who are in a probationary period as a recent government hire.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the decision to exclude civilian mariners from the hiring freeze and reduction in force, a defense official told USNI News. The hiring freeze Kilby referenced includes workers in the Navy’s four public shipyards, civilian mariners and civilian workers in depots and maintenance centers because they are considered essential personnel, USNI News understands.
The protections for civilian mariners come as Military Sealift Command struggles to hire mariners to operate the ships that replenish the fleet. Meanwhile, both the private and public shipyards have also had difficulty hiring and maintaining workforce.
For the Marine Corps, which has a much smaller pool of civilian personnel, fewer than 75 civilians have been identified for cuts, Assistant Commandant Gen. Chris Mahoney told senators.
“We started our leaning out process six budget cycles ago in accordance with Force Design and Talent Management,” Mahoney said, referring to the Marine Corps’ ongoing modernization effort and workforce overhaul that predated the Trump administration’s push to reduce headcount.
“We’re pretty lean,” he added. “So any cut is going to have some impacts. However, of the 2,300 employees that we’ve identified, we’ve got protection – either exemption or exclusion – down to a number south of 75. Not without impact, but manageable from the Marine Corps standpoint.”
Mahoney said he is concerned about obtaining exclusions from the Defense Department-wide hiring freeze because the Marine Corps typically has a natural attrition rate of 7 to 10 percent across its civilian workforce.
The effort to cut civilian headcount comes as President Donald Trump directed the Department of Government Efficiency, a new agency guided by billionaire Elon Musk, to reduce civilian headcount across the federal workforce.
Last month, the Defense Department said it would fire 5,400 “probationary workers” as part of a round of cuts, followed by a hiring freeze. It’s unclear where the Defense Department is in meeting that goal to cull the civilian workforce.
