How DOGE triggered a crisis at a highly sensitive nuclear weapons agency
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. [Continue reading…]