WASHINGTON, D.C. (Federal News Network) — The Defense Department is stripping away job protections from its civilian employees and directing managers to “act with speed and conviction” to fire employees performing “unsuccessfully.”
A new Sept. 30 memo titled “Separation of Employees with Unacceptable Performance,” which became public Tuesday, also warned that managers will be held accountable if they fail to remove poor performers.
Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata, who signed the memo, suspended the department’s requirement that managers attempt to rehabilitate underperforming employees — clearing the way for supervisors to fire workers whose performance is deemed “unacceptable” more quickly.
“They are trying to cloak it in legalistic language and make it sound legitimate, but the reality is they’re stripping due process significantly and making it easier for arbitrary terminations, similar and functional to private sector employment,” Sean Timmons, managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, told Federal News Network.
Legal experts and analysts warn that the new policy could be used to remove anyone who does not align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
The memo comes amid Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s broader push to shrink and reshape the Pentagon’s civilian workforce — Hegseth described the effort as “clearing out the debris” during his highly unusual meeting with admirals and generals last month.
“I look at this memo within the broader context of Pete Hegseth’s actions as defense secretary up to this point. We have seen from him an increasing politicization of the military. If you look at every step they’ve taken within the Department of Defense since January — this is just another piece of political maneuvering that they’re using to enable their abilities to shape the department in the image that they back and to remove people who don’t align with their vision and their political ends, and give them an ability to fire those who don’t work well with them,” Virginia Burger, senior defense policy analyst at Project on Government Oversight, told Federal News Network.
Timmons said that previously, there needed to be substantial deviations from meeting objective job-specific criteria to justify termination. Under the new memo, the criteria have become more subjective — and that subjectivity gives managers greater discretion for potentially arbitrary termination.
“If they want to give you flexibility because they like you, they can certainly bend the rules and say, ‘We’ll give you another chance.’ If they don’t like you, and you’re not with the program, you’re done,” Timmons said.
The memo advises supervisors to follow the 12 Douglas Factors that agencies are required to consider when deciding on disciplinary action against a federal employee, but then it adds language that makes it easier to justify termination. Under the nature and seriousness of the offense factor, for instance, the memo says that “even small lapses can accumulate to justify removal if they hinder DoD’s efficiency.”
“They are saying, ‘Look, we’re following Douglas, we’re following neutral criteria, we’re not making it specific to any permissible category.’ But in reality, they are — they’re just trying to navigate around it. Which is what private employers do all the time when they want to fire women. They just make the criteria impossible to comply with. They just don’t target women specifically, or target people who are pregnant specifically, or target Black people specifically — they just make the criteria impossible to fill and then it gets rid everybody,” Timmons said.
