How DOGE detonated a crisis at a highly sensitive nuclear weapons agency. Perfunctory mass firings sparked alarm across the country, as cost-cutting missteps throughout government rattle lawmakers
56 minutes ago
Viewed through thick protective glass in 2013, workers sandblast large stainless steel tanks to rid them of contaminants at the Defense Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina. (Stephen B. Morton/AP)
By Evan Halper and Hannah Natanson
Amid the tumult of mass firings, the Trump administration’s dismissal of workers who maintain America’s nuclear weapons delivered perhaps the greatest shock. These are people with highly sensitive jobs, the Energy Department would later acknowledge, who should have never been fired.
Almost all the workers were rehired in an embarrassing about-face, a prominent example of how the administration has had to reverse dismissals in multiple instances where its scattershot approach caused deeper damage to agencies than anticipated.
The employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration are stewards of a sprawling government system that keeps 5,000 nuclear warheads secure and ready. They make sure radiation doesn’t leak, weapons don’t mistakenly detonate and plutonium doesn’t get into the wrong hands.
Yet late the night before Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration perfunctorily fired 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce, over the strenuous objections of senior nuclear officials.
“The president said workers critical to national security would be exempt from the firings. But then there was an active decision to say these positions are not critical to national security,” said an official at the nuclear agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “It is so absurd I don’t even know what to say.”
The episode proved to be among the biggest blunders of Trump’s first weeks in office as he deployed the blunt instrument of the U.S. DOGE Service, overseen by billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk, to radically slash government payrolls.
A stream of panicked calls from lawmakers of both political parties led to rapid reinstatement of most of the 314 nuclear engineers, technicians and managers who had been fired via email. But not before the incident inflicted chaos and confusion within the 1,800-person agency, illuminating the dangers of applying Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” playbook to government agencies that have deadly serious missions.
The novice cost-cutters installed at the Energy Department, several nuclear workers interviewed said, appeared to lack a basic understanding of the work of the NNSA, an arm of the department that is a key pillar of the national defense.
“These are jobs directly tied to keeping bad things from happening at facilities in places like Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska and Kansas City, Missouri,” said an official who recently left the agency, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their career. “A lot of them are in red states. These lawmakers are not thrilled by the potential for bad things happening in their communities.”
The Energy Department said in a statement that fewer than 50 people were ultimately dismissed from the nuclear agency, and most were in administrative or support roles. It said federal contractors who handle most day-to-day operations at nuclear weapons plants and laboratories were exempt from cuts. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, an oil executive and fracking pioneer, spent much of the previous week reassuring employees during a tour at federal nuclear facilities. He told Scripps News that “I probably moved a little too quickly there, and when we made mistakes on layoffs in NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours.”
The administration’s cost-cutting blitz, rushed and lacking transparency, has forced it into other reversals after the practical or political implications of certain firings became clear.
The firings of officials working to stop the spread of bird flu, protect the food supply and review medical devices have been reversed. Musk himself made light of a mistake he said DOGE made that “accidentally canceled” efforts to stop the spread of the Ebola virus.
The administration has directed agencies to reverse dismissals of military veterans and military spouses, as well as workers who staff the Veteran’s Crisis Line, a suicide prevention program. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fired and then reinstated employees overseeing aid to first responders and survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At the Environmental Protection Agency, some employees were brought back after officials placed them on leave under the mistaken belief that they worked on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. (Albuquerque Journal/AP)
At the nuclear agency, the initial firings were so haphazard that entire divisions are still reeling, said current and former agency staff. Like other agency and administration employees interviewed by The Washington Post and quoted in this article, the employees spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.
Paradoxically, the administration’s rush to notch firings quickly was seen as a missed opportunity by outside specialists and critics who argue the agency needs an overhaul. Nuclear hawks say the operation is mired in red tape that hampers efforts to modernize the arsenal. Plans for replacing old warheads and innovating weapons designs are far behind schedule and over budget.
“The NNSA is failing,” said Robert Peters, a research fellow focused on nuclear weapons at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Most of the weapons in the arsenal are older than the average American.”
But the firings did not appear to be driven by a plan to improve the agency. Instead, department leaders compiled a list of all the people who could be fired because they were in their probationary period of employment, and then terminated most of them. The list included many highly specialized experts with advanced degrees who had recently been promoted from another position or joined the agency from the private sector, according to administration officials who were involved.
Workers pull drum liners containing unremediated nitrate salt waste from the original containers and repack them into new 55-gallon drums at Los Alamos. (Los Alamos National Laboratory/AP)
“It is obvious DOGE people did not understand how our nuclear weapons system works,” said Jim Walsh, a nuclear arms scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program. “This was incompetence.”
After supervisors were given the list in early February of who could be fired, they were given two hours to file any appeals. They were told to keep those written appeals extremely short. Most of the appeals were rejected by Feb. 12.
“They were allowed two or three sentences to make the case for an employee to stay,” said an employee. “Later, supervisors were told all the people on the list would be terminated anyway.”
By midnight Feb. 13, hundreds of letters had been dispatched by leadership at the Energy Department to nuclear scientists, engineers, radiation specialists and other workers at nuclear operations from Los Alamos, New Mexico to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They were abruptly cut loose. Their access to their email and any government computer systems was cut off.
Caught up in the purge were several workers key to the operation of the government’s only plant for assembling and dismantling nuclear weapons, called Pantex. It is located near Amarillo, Texas. It is the backbone of the weapons modernization effort, and also the only place where the United States can safely dismantle its many aging warheads.
“We have weapons coming out of the stockpile for good reasons,” said a federal nuclear employee. “There is a long queue for dismantlement. It all has to go through Pantex.”
Walsh was bewildered that the department fired critical workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which remains central to the U.S. nuclear weapons program 80 years after its scientists built the first atom bomb. Among those who received termination letters were the radiation manager, the emergency preparedness manager and the fire protection engineer, as first reported by the outlet the Bulwark.
“If you fire all those people and something wrong happens, that can go very badly,” Walsh said. “You think the fires in California were bad? Imagine if you have a radiation fire.”
Many of those dismissed from the agency and then rehired hold Q-level security clearance, which gives them access to nuclear secrets. Nuclear nonproliferation experts in Washington warned of the risks of firing such workers, who have knowledge that’s highly valuable to rogue states and terrorist groups. When the Iron Curtain fell and such nuclear workers in the Soviet Bloc faced unemployment, the U.S. rushed make sure they were supported financially so they didn’t sell secrets out of desperation.
The panicked calls the next morning were led by congressional Republicans typically loath to criticize Trump, according to Energy Department officials who were briefed and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details.
Among those who dialed Wright’s office, according to those people, was Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tennessee), a conservative Republican who chairs the congressional subcommittee overseeing the nuclear agency. Tennessee is home to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, which makes components for nuclear weapons. The facility also stores radioactive materials and manufactures fuel for the Navy’s nuclear-powered vessels. It was built as part of the Manhattan Project to enrich uranium for the first U.S. atomic bombs.
Calls were also made by another House Republican from Tennessee, Chuck Fleischmann, who is a leader of congressional nuclear security and nuclear cleanup caucuses. Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee also raised concern, according to people briefed on the frenzied reaction.
The lawmakers did not respond to requests for comment.
A chaotic rehiring process began after the complaints.
“Cease further forwarding of any termination notifications to employees,” read a notice sent to supervisors the morning after all the firings, according to a copy obtained by The Post. And: “Do not accept or ask staff to turn in their badges or government-furnished equipment.”
Workers were informed there was a pause on all the firings while Wright reviewed them.
The department could not initially reach some of the employees. It had locked them out of their computers and frozen their work email accounts, and supervisors scrambled to locate personal contact information, several current and former employees told The Post.
Some workers said they learned they had their job back not from a phone call or letter explaining what happened, but by receiving a copy of the curt note in which they were fired with the word “rescinded” stamped on it.
“It was chaos and bedlam,” one employee said. “Some people found out they’d been unfired by reading the newspaper.”
Among the smaller group that did not get their jobs back, some say they were told amid the confusion that they were rehired, only to be quickly fired again.
Even after rehirings at the nuclear agency, nuclear experts warn that remaining cuts expose the nation to risk. Dozens of workers who oversaw cleanup of contaminated sites where weapons were developed during the Cold War have not been brought back, said a former administration official with knowledge of the firings at the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management. The office’s mission is to protect the public from “some of the world’s most dangerous radioactive sites with large amounts of radioactive wastes, spent nuclear fuel, excess plutonium and uranium, and contaminated facilities, soil and groundwater.”
Among the positions eliminated, according to an employee in the division, were four of the program’s 11 specialists charged with keeping radioactive materials contained so they don’t create an unintended explosion or leak. That includes two of the four workers doing that job at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where weapons grade plutonium and tritium were processed.
“It is very specialized, very technical work,” said the employee. “Not a whole lot of people can be trained to do this. Losing these folks is concerning. They are there to make sure we handle and store these materials in a way that avoids a nuclear chain reaction from occurring.”
The Energy Department did not respond to questions about these jobs in the statement it sent The Post.
Retired nuclear weapons scheduled for disassembly arrive at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, in March 1996. (Remi Benali/Liaison/Getty Images)
Separated waste materials await recycling at the Pantex Plant in March 1996. (Remi Benali/Liaison/Getty Images)
Separated waste materials await recycling at the Pantex Plant in March 1996. (Remi Benali/Liaison/Getty Images)
Now outsiders and workers within the nation’s nuclear safeguard office are trying to assess fallout from the Trump mistakes.
“Serious damage has been done,” said a letter to Wright from Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate demanding accountability from the department. “Recklessly firing personnel without a strategic plan, particularly those with expertise in nonproliferation, security, and arms control oversight, is extraordinarily irresponsible and dangerous to U.S. national security.”
Abigail Hauslohner contributed to this report.
CORRECTION
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that plutonium was enriched at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge. The facility enriched uranium. The story has been corrected.
Evan Halper is a business reporter for The Washington Post, covering the energy transition. His work focuses on the tensions between energy demands and decarbonizing the economy. He came to The Post from the Los Angeles Times, where he spent two decades, most recently covering domestic policy and presidential politics from its Washington bureau.
Hannah Natanson is a Washington Post reporter covering national education. Reach her securely on Signal at 202-580-5477.
