The Defense Department said Friday that it’s cutting 5,400 probationary workers starting next week and will put a hiring freeze in place.

It comes after staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, were at the Pentagon earlier in the week and received lists of such employees, U.S. officials said. They said those lists did not include uniformed military personnel, who are exempt. Probationary employees are generally those on the job for less than a year and who have yet to gain civil service protection.

“We anticipate reducing the Department’s civilian workforce by 5-8% to produce efficiencies and refocus the Department on the President’s priorities and restoring readiness in the force,” Darin Selnick, who is acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in a statement.

President Donald Trump’s administration is firing thousands of federal workers who have fewer civil service protections. For example, roughly 2,000 employees were cut from the U.S. Forest Service, and an 7,000 people are expected to be let go at the Internal Revenue Service.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has supported cuts, posting on X last week that the Pentagon needs “to cut the fat (HQ) and grow the muscle (warfighters.)”

The Defense Department is the largest government agency, with the Government Accountability Office finding in 2023 that it had more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers.

Hegseth also has directed the military services to identify $50 billion in programs that could be cut next year to redirect those savings to fund Trump’s priorities. It represents about 8% of the military’s budget.

The Republican-controlled US Senate on Thursday confirmed Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist of President Donald Trump, to be director of the FBI, the country’s top law enforcement agency.

Patel, 44, whose nomination sparked fierce but ultimately futile opposition from Democrats, was approved by a 51-49 vote.

The vote was split along party lines with the exception of two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted not to confirm Patel to head the 38,000-strong Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Patel drew fire from Democrats for his promotion of conspiracy theories, his defense of pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his vow to root out members of a supposed “deep state” plotting to oppose the Republican president.

The Senate has approved all of Trump’s cabinet picks so far, underscoring his iron grip on the Republican Party.

Among them is Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed as the nation’s spy chief despite past support for adversarial nations including Russia and Syria, and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be health secretary.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, in a last-ditch bid to derail Patel’s nomination, held a press conference outside FBI headquarters in downtown Washington on Thursday and warned that he would be “a political and national security disaster” as FBI chief.

Speaking later on the Senate floor, Durbin said Patel is “dangerously, politically extreme.”

“He has repeatedly expressed his intention to use our nation’s most important law enforcement agency to retaliate against his political enemies,” he said.

Patel, who holds a law degree from Pace University and worked as a federal prosecutor, replaces Christopher Wray, who was named FBI director by Trump during his first term in office.

Relations between Wray and Trump became strained, however, and though he had three more years remaining in his 10-year tenure, Wray resigned after Trump won November’s presidential election.

– ‘Enemies list’ –

A son of Indian immigrants, the New York-born Patel served in several high-level posts during Trump’s first administration, including as senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary.

There were fiery exchanges at Patel’s confirmation hearing last month as Democrats brought up a list of 60 supposed “deep state” actors — all critics of Trump — he included in a 2022 book, whom he said should be investigated or “otherwise reviled.”

Patel has denied that he has an “enemies list” and told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was merely interested in bringing lawbreakers to book.

“All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution,” he said.

The FBI has been in turmoil since Trump took office and a number of agents have been fired or demoted including some involved in the prosecutions of Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election results and mishandling classified documents.

Nine FBI agents have sued the Justice Department, seeking to block efforts to collect information on agents who were involved in investigating Trump and the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.

In their complaint, the FBI agents said the effort to collect information on employees who participated in the investigations was part of a “purge” orchestrated by Trump as “politically motivated retribution.”

Trump, on his first day in the White House, pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters who stormed Congress in a bid to block certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.

The EU’s top diplomat said Thursday she had initially thought US President Donald Trump had confused Volodymyr Zelensky with Vladimir Putin when he called the Ukrainian leader a “dictator”.

“First when I heard this, I was like, oh, he must be mixing the two, because clearly Putin is the dictator,” Kaja Kallas told reporters in Johannesburg.

In a post on his Truth Social platform Wednesday, Trump wrote that Zelensky was a “dictator without elections”.

Zelensky’s five-year term expired last year but Ukrainian law does not require elections during war-time.

“Zelensky is an elected leader in fair and free elections,” Kallas said in a briefing after attending a meeting of G20 foreign ministers.

The constitutions of many countries allow for elections to be suspended during wartime in order to focus on the conflict, she said.

Russia, which attacked Ukraine in 2022, could choose to hold free elections but “they are afraid of democracy expanding because in democracy, the leaders are held accountable,” the EU foreign policy chief said.

“It’s literally from the dictator’s handbook.”

Trump has rattled Ukraine and its European backers by opening direct talks with Moscow on ending the war but excluding Kyiv and European countries.

Kallas said the focus should remain on supporting Ukraine and putting political and economic pressure on Russia.

The stronger Ukraine is on “the battlefield, the stronger they are behind the negotiation table,” she said, adding, “Russia doesn’t really want peace.”

It was also premature to talk about sending troops to protect Ukraine after any ceasefire deal with Russia, Kallas said.

Rather, Ukraine needed concrete security guarantees that Russia would not attack again, she said, adding that history had shown that ceasefires had only been opportunities for Russia “to regroup and rearm.”

AFP