While not directly linking it to “the Trump administration’s mandate to reduce the civilian workforce throughout the Department of Defense,” Military.com’s reporting on the reduction of hours at a daycare center for the children of airmen stationed at Eglin Air Foce base on the Florida panhandle from 12 to 10 hours a day makes ample mention of the regime’s directive and sources say the situation has been “exacerbated” by the MAGA reich’s DOGE spending cuts circlejerk.

“This reduction in operating hours is necessary to address critical staffing challenges to reduce the risk of unexpected room closures and potential denial of child care,” says a memo obtained by Military.com about the situation, with the already-existing “critical staffing challenges” probably not going to be fixed anytime soon while drunken asshole Pete Hegseth cuts off civilian employee hiring.

The article goes on to detail a handful of closures and disenrollments of families living on various Air and Space Force bases over the last few months. Luckily officers in the Pentagon were able to talk Hegseth and his minions into a formal exemption for daycare staff from an anticipated 50,000 to 60,000 civilian job cuts across the Defense Department, averting an apocalyptic clusterfuck.

Instead it seems like a slow bleed of just regular attrition in a field that’s extremely hard to find good people for even in the private sector where daycare centers charge freaking exorbitant monthly fees. In the military it’s not a perk of the job so much as a fucking mission critical readiness measure that only a complete asshole would fail to recognize as such. “Sorry, Lieutenant, I’d be totally down to operate the IR camera on the flight to track the sketchy Iranian-flagged vessel off the coast of South Carolina tonight but my mother-in-law twisted her ankle. Yeah… Wife’s on duty at the med bay and she can’t get off either,” is not how you run an America First military and yet here we are.