PATUXENT RIVER, Md. — On April 29, 2025, officials from Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) met with the St. Mary’s County commissioners during a joint Encroachment Mitigation and Prevention Meeting to discuss military-community planning, including the organization’s ongoing workforce reduction efforts.
NAVAIR has reduced the size of its workforce by approximately 9.3% through the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Defense (DOD) Deferred Resignation Programs (DRP). The reduction applies across the entire NAVAIR organization, not just at NAS Patuxent River. The DRPs are voluntary.
NAVAIR is currently under a DOD-imposed hiring freeze. Any requests for exemptions must be approved by the secretary of the Navy with endorsement from the DOD. Despite those limitations, leadership said the organization is actively working to shore up gaps through rotations and internal reassignments to maintain critical operations and avoid disruption.
NAVAIR’s internship pipeline remains active, and college students are still expected to participate in summer internship placements.
Leadership reaffirmed the command’s mission to support naval aviation, noting that the systems developed, tested and delivered through NAVAIR will continue.
St. Mary’s County leaders and NAVAIR representatives reiterated their commitment to supporting the local workforce, addressing community needs and ensuring that the region continues to thrive.
Watch the full meeting: April 29, 2025 — CSMC Joint Meeting with NAS Patuxent River on YouTube.
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I didn’t vote for this, did you?
I Did. YES
Yes, the majority of Americans did vote for exactly this.
They took the DRP and now the Republicans in Congress want to cut their retirement benefits. Nice bait and switch. But, looking at how St. Mary’s county voted, most of y’all voted for the convicted felon so you get what you vote for.
Yes I did… and I know it was a much better choice than the vile alternative, without question. 🙂
I wonder how much a stunt like that costs taxpayers?
As a NAVAIR employee, I can confirm that 95% of the people that took the DRP were work-from-home staff that refused to return to work. They spent 7.5hr of their 8hr shift watching Netflix and babysitting grandchildren. How much does that crap cost taxpayers?
A world full of lemmings reciting what financially motivated politicians and media tell them.
As a NAVSEA employee at Indian Head, we lost many really good engineers and technicians to the DRP and VERA, taking decades of important experience and knowledge with them. Now the rest of us are overworked and stressed trying to fill in the gaps. This does not save money or make us more efficient. Get your head out of the sand and eyes off Fox News.
As a NAVLAND employee, we only lost good ones that were single-handedly doing the work of five-plus people that have been home watching Netflix collecting checks for the last four years. It is upsetting because we can’t take them for granted anymore and now we actually have to do our jobs.
Right
As a person with common sense, I am 100% sure this is a made up statistic and based solely on your anecdotal experience
Weed out the ones that just want to collect a check voluntarily, brilliant!
you may work for free but the rest of us do want that check.
I don’t understand your comment, do you like your job or are you just there to collect a check? People that like their jobs tend to help the company produce better services. They also make jobs for those around them a pleasant experience. People that are just there to collect a check don’t care about the quality of their work or making co-workers roles easier.
My guess is you’re wrong a lot.
How would you do that? It’s so easy to spout off nonsense but how do you do that? Fire an entire agency, realize you seriously f’d up and then hire them back? Or just break all rules and laws and ruin peoples lives?
I feel very comfortable in saying you’re not a Base worker because of your statement.
You obviously don’t work anywhere near there. Your statement is clueless on how many good people actually left.
It doesn’t seem like a lot when your still sitting in traffic for hours at a time.
Would be interesting to know the percentage of that 9.3 that were ‘not’ already considering retirement. Those people are ‘getting paid to go home early’, then do what they planned on doing anyway…retire. The difference is now a position goes away. A year, year-and-a-half from now, they work that didn’t get done will rear it’s head in the way of: skipped processes; training shortfalls; lack of fleet equipment/ spare parts; untracked contracts…the list goes on. This will be followed by a panic of, “How did this happen?”…followed by a, “We’re fixing this by hiring a bunch of people.” This will ultimately cost the taxpayers Much more in the long run
Spent two hours talking to former co-worker (I’m retired) who took the early out. He is 49 and a hard worker but told me he was leaving bacause he wants to see things accomplished. The glacial pace of acquisition and S&T was his reason. I retired 6 years ago (during one of our constant re-orgs) and the stuff I was working on then, and had been for years, is just now making it to prototype. He didn’t want to just get the paycheck. Though as my father used to say, “there’s nothing wrong with working for the money”