Overview – FY 2025 Defense Budget
CHAPTER 4 BUILDING ENDURING ADVANTAGES
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• The Department pursues investments to further promote and expand internship opportunities
to support entry and early career-level recruitment programs. These programs provide an
avenue to bring in different perspectives and a continuous pipeline of diverse talent.
• To address timeliness in recruitment and onboarding, the Department is collecting and
analyzing by-segment hiring data to identify and improve process bottlenecks. The CTMO
uses these results to develop enterprise-level hiring, insights, and behaviors, driving strategic
process improvement and hiring and talent management efficiencies.
• Furthermore, the Department will continue establishing and expanding work role coding to
define needed critical talent beyond the traditional occupational series coding. The DoD will
continue focusing on areas of priority in the future, including digital, cyber, engineering, and
technological sciences, along with others.
• Lastly, the Department invests additional resources to articulate and promote the DoD Civilian
Careers employer brand to attract high-caliber talent in cyber, STEM, and all occupational
areas where civilian employees drive mission success. Every element of the TF brings unique
strengths to the Department, such as providing organic skills, expertise, and institutional
continuity. Effective and appropriate use of civilians allows the Department to focus its
Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Guardians on the tasks and functions that are
genuinely military essential—thereby enhancing our warfighters’ readiness and operational
capability. There is no “one-size-fits-all” aspect to the TF. The Department recognizes that
concerns have been raised over the size, composition, and costs of its civilian workforce and
is committed to right-sizing and optimizing its TF utilizing the latest technological capabilities
– to include military, civilians, and contracted support – to achieve mission effectiveness and
deliver warfighting capability and readiness.
To that end, the FY 2025 budget request takes prudent, well-reasoned actions to shape the
civilian workforce, maintaining a workforce that fully supports the National Defense,
Administration and Department priorities. This includes continuously resourcing the cyber, digital,
and innovation workforce by improving and accelerating recruiting, upskilling, reskilling, and
retaining tech-savvy civilian talent. Additionally, there is an emphasis on efforts to train
professionals on sexual harassment and assault and suicide prevention workforce, and
expanding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives.
The Department estimates the number of direct hire civilian Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs)
(excluding Cemeteries and Foreign National Indirect Hires) will increase slightly by 0.1 percent,
from approximately 795,027 in FY 2024 to 795,432 in FY 2025. Consistent with title 10
requirements and annual appropriations guidance, the Department’s FY 2025 budget request for
civilians is predicated on requirements and workload. Concurrently, and to better inform our
future years defense program, the Department is undertaking a comprehensive review of not only
of our civilian workforce, but also our TF, and doing so through the lens of requirements to ensure
we are consistently applying resources most effectively and efficiently to our most critical and
compelling needs related to readiness, warfighting capabilities, and meeting the pacing threats
and imperatives of the NDS. As part of the review, the Department assesses how artificial
intelligence, machine learning, additive manufacturing, autonomous and remotely operated
platforms, predictive analytics, big data, and other emerging technologies can help us achieve
our mission while optimizing our workforce and resources. Simultaneously, successfully
implementing and operationalizing these technologies requires a highly skilled and motivated
workforce and the funding necessary to acquire the new technologies based on cost-conscious
factual requirements and sound data to improve our ability to recruit, develop, and retain such a
workforce. This must be predicated on well-reasoned and analytically based decision-making,
not arbitrary reductions or artificial suppression of the civilian workforce. The Department’s