Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fired the top U.S. authority for nuclear-safety matters last week—contradicting claims it was largely “administrative staff” at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) who got the ax.
DOGE later rushed to rehire the critical official and he agreed to return, agency staffers told The Bulwark, but added that quick fix was not without its damage.
The gaffe by Musk’s lackeys has top scientific minds at the nuclear agency, based in Washington and the New Mexico desert, ready to jump ship as a report claims a “brain drain” is imminent.
That would make the U.S. less safe from a domestic nuclear incident and less prepared on the international stage, The Bulwark suggested, noting the NNSA—at 85 employees entering the year—was already more than 40 below its “optimal” amount.
It is apparently already hard enough to get some of top country’s top nuclear minds to move to the middle-of-nowhere field office of Los Alamos, New Mexico—the site famously chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer in World War II. Now, with DOGE threatening to upend the agency’s workforce at any given moment, a chunk of key staffers are considering early retirement or taking the government’s “fork in the road” buyout.
The Bulwark reports morale is “through the floor” at NNSA, far from ideal for the group of federal workers who handle nuclear waste and run the sole U.S. manufacturing site for the plutonium pits needed to build new—or refurbish old—nukes.
Some roles in the agency are so niche that staffers are sounding the alarm DOGE may be firing—or alienating—the only people capable of completing critical jobs.
“The skill set is so narrowly specific that there might be five guys in the entire U.S. who can do it,” one employee told The Bulwark. “And you might have just fired one, two or three are retired, and the other is based somewhere else in the U.S. and doesn’t want to move. So you’re hosed.”
Adding to the agency’s headache is a federal hiring freeze implemented in the early days of Trump’s second adminstration. That means the roles vacated by terminations and retirements can not be filled immediately.
Department of Energy Press Secretary Ben Dietderich defended the DOGE cuts and told The Bulwark “President Trump and the Department of Energy are committed to making government more accountable, efficient, and restoring proper stewardship of the American taxpayer’s dollars.”
The statement also reiterated the claims terminated employees “held primarily administrative roles,” despite The Bulwark identifying at least six others who were fired from—and rehired to—non-administrative roles in NNSA alone.
Those positions included the Los Alamos emergency preparedness manager, who works to minimize the effects of a nuclear accident and the site’s radiation protection manager.
DOGE has deployed slash-and-burn tactics across the federal government since Jan. 20. Critics have claimed some cuts were made blindly with the assumption the federal government is so bloated that large-scale terminations could be carried out without consequence.
At the Department of Energy—which oversees the NNSA—1,200 to 2,000 workers were fired across its power grid office, its nuclear security administration, and the loans office, Reuters reported.
The most-impacted workers are those who were recently hired or changed positions, with Musk’s team ordering the firing of nearly all probationary employees (with some national security and safety-related exceptions) across the federal government.
