Civilians at the Pentagon continue missing paychecks while working alongside troops getting paid

By Haley Britzky, CNN

(CNN) — As the US passes the record for the longest government shutdown in history on Wednesday, civilian employees of the Defense Department — many of whom are veterans and military family members — are questioning how the agency is treating their federal service as some struggle to make ends meet amid missed paychecks.

Eight Defense Department civilians, stationed everywhere from Hawaii to Germany, told CNN morale is low and falling fast as the government shutdown drags on with no clear end in sight. Several said they and others they know are actively looking to leave federal service after years or even decades of prior commitment, while others said they feel a responsibility to stay despite the increasingly hostile environment they find themselves in.

Almost all of the civilians who spoke to CNN are veterans themselves. As of 2021, nearly half of the Pentagon’s civilian employees were veterans. That can add an additional layer of frustration to how civilians have been spoken about and treated as they work side by side with those in uniform keeping the Defense Department running.

“Me and my veteran friends are like, do they not know? When you disrespect the civilians who are working in federal service, do they not know that so many of them are actually veterans?” one Navy veteran who is a Defense Department civilian in Hawaii told CNN.

“It’s a slap in the face,” said another civilian who works in human resources overseas, and who is a military spouse and parent.

The Defense Department employs nearly a million civilian employees, more than half of whom are continuing to work during the shutdown. A majority of those who are still working aren’t getting paid. Hundreds of thousands more – 334,900 according to agency contingency plans – have been furloughed and aren’t working nor receiving paychecks while the government lacks spending authority.

By contrast, despite a lack of Congressional action to provide funding, the Trump administration has moved money between accounts to pay service members in uniform during the shutdown, though it’s unclear where funds will come from for future paychecks. Unpaid civilians have in at least some cases also been the ones processing payment for their military counterparts, the civilian working in HR said.

Each of the civilians who spoke to CNN said they find great value and pride in their work for the US military; several described a deep commitment to serving their country as a civilian after leaving their own time in uniform. DoD civilians serve as medical professionals at military hospitals, firefighters on military bases, intelligence analysts and teachers at on-base schools for military children, among other jobs.

But they said the rhetoric around government civilians throughout this year by the Trump administration, and the seemingly constant efforts to cut down the civilian workforce, has left them feeling abandoned by leaders they say don’t understand the critical nature of their work.

One civilian – a military veteran – described concerns for US national security the longer the shutdown drags on. A person’s debt and financial concerns are a key question in the process to get a security clearance, they explained, and many civilians are being forced to take out loans to stay afloat while missing paychecks.

“One of the things we look for when it comes to counterintelligence threats, insider threats, is financial hardship,” the civilian said. “And I am in a building surrounded by super top-secret operations, and people who are running the f**k out of money.”

In response to an email outlining the concerns civilians voiced in this article, Pentagon press secretary Kinglsey Wilson said the reporting was a “completely off base and partisan story devoid of facts.”

“If [Defense Department] civilians are upset about anything, it’s the Democrats voting over a dozen times to withhold their pay, making it hard for our federal workers and uniformed servicemembers to pay rent, enjoy Thanksgiving, and buy Christmas presents for their children,” Wilson said.

Several civilians who spoke to CNN expressed exhaustion at what has been a year full of hurdles for those who just want to do their jobs.

Being in human resources, the civilian working in HR overseas and their coworkers have become counselors at times, they told CNN, as people have been repeatedly pushed to tears navigating the stress of wondering how to pay rent or their child’s college tuition back home. Suicide “has come up several times,” the civilian said.

“It’s humiliating,” the civilian said bluntly. “As much as I love my country, as much as I love my Department of Defense and Department of the Army, I have never felt so humiliated and degraded in my life.”

While several civilians said they are actively looking to leave federal service to find more stability there is also a sense of anxiety with how their replacements might respond to the current pressures of working for the Pentagon.

“I’m nervous about how they will behave when told to do something that maybe they shouldn’t do,” a senior Army veteran-turned-civilian said. “I have the luxury that if I’m given an order that I feel is illegal, unethical, or immoral, saying f**k you I’m not doing that. I don’t know if the next person will feel that way.”

Months of pressure

Almost from the very start of the Trump administration, many of the civilians who spoke to CNN said, they felt their value being diminished.

Federal agencies began pushing buyouts and delayed resignation programs in an attempt to shrink the civilian workforce, leaving many angry and confused. Wilson said in her statement to CNN that civilians who took the delayed resignation opportunity, a key feature of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort that aimed to find massive cost saving across government, “are happy because they got a great deal.”

Employees also began receiving instructions to send in five bullet points explaining what they’d done that week, with little to no clarity on where those lists were going, who would be reviewing them, or what it was exactly that they wanted to see.

In her statement, Wilson said that in “all jobs, whether government or not, tracking metrics and submitting reports is the norm.” But the Navy veteran-turned-civilian employee in Hawaii rejected the idea that the five-bullet-points ask was standard, if only because there was so little clarity on how the reports would be used.

“We had seen how our peers were getting let go from their jobs for seemingly not big deals, it put all of us on notice. The rhetoric in which they were talking about civilian service put all of us on notice – that we were replaceable, our service didn’t matter,” the civilian said. “So sure, [the five bullet points] wasn’t a big deal, but they had already proven that tasks that were not a big deal were fireable offenses.”

Several civilians working outside of the continental US told CNN a deep sense of anxiety and distrust set in after watching counterparts at USAID, for example, get abruptly laid off and left to facilitate and fund their own move back to the US on short notice. CNN reported in February that scores of USAID employees around the globe — some in dangerous areas — were left scrambling and in shock as they were abruptly locked out of secure systems and left to manage the next steps alone.

Another DOD civilian, also a Navy veteran who is serving overseas, told CNN that watching the dismantling of USAID was “terrifying,” particularly given the surprising nature of so many announcements at the beginning of the administration.

“That really set the tone for a lot of us overseas, in a no-shit panic,” the civilian said, adding that panic has “ebbed and flowed” ever since.

In February, the Pentagon began requiring supervisors to submit lists of probationary civilian employees for potential termination, while some defense officials started raising concerns that the broad firings could harm US military readiness and even break the law. Officials scrambled to create lists of workers who should be exempted from the firings because of their crucial roles in intelligence, cyber security operations or other important national security issues.

The Pentagon eventually announced its intention to fire 5-8% of its civilian workforce, and thus far the agency has reduced its payrolls by more than 50,000 employees mainly by not backfilling when civilians have retired or otherwise left federal service.

The civilians who spoke to CNN described what they see as both a total lack of understanding – and lack of interest in learning – what civilians do for the US military. One explained that civilians make up the majority of the military intelligence workforce; another, who is also an Army veteran, recalled civilians regularly being alongside him during combat deployments over the last two decades.

The US military would “grind to a halt” without DOD civilians, a second Army veteran-turned-DOD civilian said.

“You will not have intelligence feeding operations the way it’s supposed to, you will not have operations planned so that people are where they need to be at the right time, you will not have products and materiel where it should be in order to engage in a fight,” they added.

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