By Natasha Bertrand and Haley Britzky, CNN

(CNN) — The Pentagon announced Friday it plans toultimately fire five to eight percent of the military’s approximately 950,000 civilian employees, with an initial tranche of 5,400 probationary workers who don’t have “mission-critical” roles expected to be terminated next week.

While that is a small percentage of the 55,000 probationary employees who are at risk of being fired en masse, the eventual cuts could amount to a significant reduction in the civilian workforce.

“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,” Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Darin Selnick, said in a statement.

That would mean that eventually 47,500 to 76,000 people in total could be let go.

Earlier on Friday, CNN reported the Defense Department had temporarily paused a plan to carry out mass firings of civilian probationary employees until Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel can carry out a more thorough review of the impacts such firings could have on US military readiness, according to two defense officials familiar with the matter.

Selnick said that the first 5,400 could be fired early next week, and more could be terminated “as we conduct a further analysis of our personnel needs, complying as always with all applicable laws.”

“As the Secretary made clear, it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical,” he added. “Taxpayers deserve to have us take a thorough look at our workforce top-to-bottom to see where we can eliminate redundancies.”

The pause on firing a broader swathe of civilian employees all at once came after CNN reported on Wednesday that the mass terminations, which could affect over 50,000 civilian employees across the Pentagon, could run afoul of Title 10 section 129a of the US code. Following that report, Pentagon lawyers began reviewing the legality of the planned terminations more closely, the officials said.

The law says that the secretary of defense “may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis” of how those firings could impact the US military’s lethality and readiness. The law also says that mitigating risk to US military readiness takes precedence over cost.

A senior defense official told CNN on Wednesday that such an analysis had not been carried out before military leaders were ordered to make lists of employees to fire.

The office of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declined to comment.

Throughout this week, defense officials had been scrambling and working late into the night to create lists of individual workers who should be exempted from the firings because they are critical to ongoing mission support, including those who work in cybersecurity, intelligence, operations, foreign military sales and other critical national security roles, several defense officials said.

Hegseth said in a video posted to X on Thursday that the department was focusing on terminating lower-performing employees first. But defense officials told CNN that the Office of Personnel Management is using a broad justification for the firings, arguing to DoD that these probationary employees don’t contribute positively to the Pentagon’s overall performance because they are no longer needed.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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