Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers in DOGE reversal

• By Tara Copp and Anthony Izaguirre The Associated Press

Feb 16, 2025

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 U.S. officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration were abruptly laid off late 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.

One of the hardest hit offices was the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, which saw about 30% 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 a DOGE purge across the Department of Energy that targeted about 2,000 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, referencing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

“They don’t seem to realize 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“This letter serves as formal notification that the termination decision issued to you on Feb. 13, 2025 has been rescinded, effective immediately,” said the memo.

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

While 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, many others dealt with nuclear issues, even if they didn’t directly work on weapons programs.

This included managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there doesn’t further contaminate nearby communities.

That incudes 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.

U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and U.S. Sen. 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.

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 major $750 billion nuclear weapons modernization 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% of the workforce had been there 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 both at home and abroad.

“I think the signal to U.S. 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.”

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Published comment by Greg Mello:

We at the Los Alamos Study Group applaud the cuts. There are far too many people working for NNSA and its contractors. The U.S. nuclear warhead business, with which we are deeply familiar, is 97% privatized and riddled with waste, legalized fraud, and abuse of taxpayers' money. The very worst of the wasteful sites is right here at Los Alamos; the next is Livermore which was set up in order to operate in, and still does operate in, substantial redundancy with LANL, albeit with greater competency in some areas due to its location in the high-tech and geographically-better-suited Bay Area.

The NNSA was set up in 1999 to evade accountability for the weapons program and decrease transparency, while creating a separate line of access to the President and more effective, single-minded advocacy for nuclear weapons. Some NNSA administrative functions are duplicative of functions in the Department of Energy ("Big DOE"). NNSA is an agency which should never have been created and should not exist today. Today's NNSA missions are also of dubious legality under the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Some of these missions are likely to be terminated in any case, due to the overwhelming waste and impracticality they embody. An example is plutonium pit production at LANL, a job for which LANL has already hired thousands of people and one which NNSA itself plans to terminate in due time. Meanwhile the mission is not supported by a single NNSA analysis of alternatives, engineering analysis, or environmental impact statement. As one staff member at the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it, "A dollar spent on pit production at LANL, beyond demonstration and training, is a dollar wasted."

No NNSA employee, and no Triad employee, should consider that they have a sinecure for life -- while making engines of mass death in supposed service to "national security." Regarding Pantex in particular, key NNSA personnel are being hired by the site contractor on an emergency basis, to retain their skills and experience.

Finally, the big reveal in this article is going to be, for many people, the pro-nuclear, pro-U.S.-empire attitude of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Could there be a clearer statement of UCS' loyalty to the U.S. foreign policy "Blob" than the quote used here? This ambiguity of loyalty -- supposedly to arms control and the environment, but actually to power and money -- is why UCS has been so ineffectual over the past two decades. UCS also recently wrote a court declaration arguing (illogically and disjointly) in favor of making LANL the sole plutonium pit factory in the U.S., including the wild statement that some say LANL could make 450 pits per year, more than 10 times as much as NNSA requires. Lovely. We recently invited UCS to debate us, NNSA chief Jill Hruby, and GAO in a panel discussion at the National Press Club. Dr. Hruby, a stand-up person and straight shooter, accepted the invite. UCS did not.