UNITED STATES AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. — According to sources inside and outside the Air Force Academy, over 50 civilian faculty members have already left the institution through the voluntary Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) offered earlier this year.
Ahead of the next fiscal year, current and former faculty fear that the number could double or triple through involuntary cuts. This is in addition to active-duty military instructors who’ve cycled out, sources said.
“The insidious part of it is those who took the DRP, their positions disappeared,” said Tom Bewley, who served as the distinguished visiting professor in the Academy’s mechanical engineering department last academic year. “For everyone who took them, we are down a civilian faculty that's not getting replaced.”
Bewley, a former Air Force officer and pilot himself, previously penned a Denver Post op-ed with 90 other cosigners, calling on Air Force Academy (USAFA) leadership to stop proposed civilian faculty cuts.
Bewley and the other former Air Force graduates, instructors, and vets, argued that reducing civilian faculty would greatly diminish the Academy’s academic rigor, reduce the number of majors offered, and risk the potential loss of accreditation in technical fields.
The op-ed came after reporting by KOAA and news partner the Gazette revealed USAFA Superintendent Tony Bauernfeind was looking to cut up to 100 civilian staff. It’s allegedly part of a broader effort to bring the ratio of active-duty military instructors to civilian instructors to 80:20.
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“I'm speaking for a lot of people, I think, who can't speak,” Bewley said of his decision to speak on the record. “I have a lot of friends now at the Air Force Academy who, by virtue of their positions, have to remain silent, especially those in uniform, but those who also have a job there as civilians.”
Bewley said his information on the number of DRP acceptances this year and the additional 50 to 100 cuts that could be announced ahead of Fiscal Year 2026 in October were relayed to him by current USAFA faculty, including two department chairs.
Separately, current USAFA faculty confirmed the same numbers to KOAA, but asked to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal.
Bewley said he and these faculty aren’t speaking out to damage the Academy, but rather in the hopes it maintains its elite status as a higher institution of learning. Bewley and his sources went department by department to determine how many faculty had already accepted the DRP or left through other means, he said.
“I think a lot of people were wondering, how do we keep moving forward without the continuity and the technical expertise of these faculty?” he said. “So the mood this spring semester in multiple departments that I interacted with was kind of morose.”
Bewley and sources inside USAFA said these discussions have not only been behind closed doors with a small committee of people, including department heads, but that they’ve had to sign Non-disclosure Agreements (NDA) to prevent the discussions from leaking out publicly.
“Strangely and concerning is that much of the discussions are not just behind closed discussion, closed doors, but they're protected under NDA,” Bewley said. “They really don't want the discussions being broadly announced.”
Bewley and KOAA sources also voiced concern that these voluntary resignations led to some departments being greatly reduced in personnel while others were left relatively unscathed. Mechanical engineering, for instance, dropped from 24 instructors to 16 next year. Bewley said three of those were civilians and five were military who cycled out, but Bewley noted they weren’t being filled as far as he knew.
USAFA has previously said all discussions surrounding civilian faculty cuts were “pre-decisional,” but Bewley and other sources said the next public announcement could very well be “post-decisional,” and decisions will be final without public input.
KOAA sent a series of questions to the Air Force Academy, including the details of this reporting and if any of it was disputed. Notably, the Academy’s response did not directly contradict or dispute any of the numbers provided.
“The U.S. Air Force Academy is conducting prudent planning to identify the requirements needed to best execute our mission of forging leaders of character and quality ready on Day One to lead the Air Force and Space Force. Our design efforts are a small piece of the larger transformation to increase warfighter readiness and lethality,” said an Academy spokesperson in an email.
“In response to workforce shaping across our civilian force, we will work to retain the positions and people with the expertise needed to secure the installation, continue to feed, house and provide medical services to cadets, retain accreditation and offer an array of majors. We are committed to delivering world-class military training, academics, and athletics, while sustaining and protecting our facilities and installation.”
In what could be described as one of his last-ditch efforts, Bewley composed a path forward in which spending is reduced, and a certain number of faculty is cut. In his proposal, he notes the USAFA majors with only a handful of cadets could be merged into other departments or cut altogether. His proposal can be read here.
But Bewley noted his ideas only work if there are no further slashes to the number of civilian faculty.
Colorado Republican Congressman Jeff Crank, who sits on the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors and whose district includes USAFA, said he’s planning to bring the concerns of civilian faculty cuts up in the August Board of Visitors meeting. It is the first scheduled meeting of the year.
“There's some people who I understand have left because they chose to leave, who were civilian faculty,” Crank said. “But I want to make sure that the Air Force Academy is the excellent higher education institution that it has been in the past. And so I will raise that issue with the superintendent again at the Board of Visitors meeting, as I did a few weeks back.”
But Bewley and sources within the Academy fear waiting to discuss the matter in August might be too late to reverse course.
Email Senior Reporter Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@koaa.com. Follow @brettforrestTV on X and Brett Forrest News on Facebook.
Brett can also communicate via encrypted apps like Signal. Due to the sensitive nature of ongoing reporting from federal actions, he is willing to take steps to protect identities.
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