‘It’s nuts’: In a DOGE reversal, firings of US nuclear weapons workers halted

Washington: The Trump administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that DOGE’s blind cost-cutting will put communities at risk.

Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to email before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning to find they were locked out. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Staff from the National Nuclear Security Administration work on a weapon.

One of the hardest-hit offices was the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, which saw about 30 per cent of the cuts. Those employees work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise, with the highest levels of clearance.

The hundreds let go at NNSA were part of Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency’s (DOGE) purge across the Department of Energy that targeted about 2000 employees.

“The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “They don’t seem to realise that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons more than it is the Department of Energy.”

By late Friday night, the agency’s acting director, Teresa Robbins, issued a memo rescinding the firings for all but 28 of those hundreds of fired staff members.

“This letter serves as formal notification that the termination decision issued to you on February 13, 2025, has been rescinded, effective immediately,” said the memo, which was obtained by the AP.

The accounts from the three officials contradict an official statement from the Energy Department, which said fewer than 50 NNSA staffers were let go, calling them “probationary employees” who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles”.

But that wasn’t the case. The firings prompted one NNSA senior staffer to post a warning and call to action.

“This is a pivotal moment. We must decide whether we are truly committed to leading on the world stage or if we are content with undermining the very systems that secure our nation’s future,” deputy division director Rob Plonski posted to LinkedIn.

“Cutting the federal workforce responsible for these functions may be seen as reckless at best and adversarily opportunistic at worst.”

Some of the Energy Department employees who were fired dealt with energy efficiency and the effects of climate change, issues not seen as priorities by the Trump administration. But many others dealt with nuclear issues, even if they didn’t directly work on weapons programs, such as managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there did not further contaminate nearby communities.

That includes the Savannah River National Laboratory in Jackson, South Carolina; the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state, where workers secure 177 high-level waste tanks from the site’s previous work producing plutonium for the atomic bomb; and the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, a Superfund contamination site where much of the early work on the Manhattan Project was done, among others.

US congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and US senator Patty Murray of Washington, both Democrats, called the firings last week “utterly callous and dangerous”.

The NNSA staff who had been reinstated could not all be reached after they were fired, and some were reconsidering whether to return to work, given the uncertainty created by DOGE.

One NNSA source said managers had been called on Thursday evening and told to inform people they had been let go, but then received emails on Friday saying the situation had suddenly changed.

“STOP ALL ACTIONS WITH TERMINATIONS,” said one email sent to managers, one source said, adding that they were told to re-justify employment of some workers.

“It’s nuts,” the source said.

Another NNSA source said the confusion distracted NNSA workers and managers from their critical national security work.

Democratic politicians blasted the layoffs at NNSA, calling them “shocking”.

Many federal employees who had worked on the nation’s nuclear programs had spent their entire careers there, and there was a wave of retirements in recent years that cost the agency years of institutional knowledge.

But it’s now in the midst of a $US750 billion ($1.18 trillion) modernisation effort – including new land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, new stealth bombers and new submarine-launched warheads. In response, the labs have aggressively hired over the past few years: in 2023, 60 per cent of the workforce had been there for five years or less.

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the firings could disrupt the day-to-day workings of the agency and create a sense of instability over the nuclear program at home and abroad.

“I think the signal to US adversaries is pretty clear: throw a monkey wrench in the whole national security apparatus and cause disarray,” he said. “That can only benefit the adversaries of this country.”

AP, Reuters

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