Trump Administration Under Fire After Accidentally Firing Workers Overseeing Nation’s Nuclear Power Then Scrambling to Rehire Them
If anyone should’ve felt safe in their government jobs, you’d assume it would be the 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, charged with oversight of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Never assume.
In what the White House is now calling a mistake, a large swath of NNSA employees were fired last Thursday before the Trump administration realized they had cleared out the wrong agency. By Friday, they were scrambling to rehire these essential workers. All but 28 employees had their dismissals rescinded, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The NNSA operates under the umbrella of the Department of Energy, which is tasked with all energy production in general.
An Energy Department spokesperson told CNN that “less than 50 people were fired … primarily administrative and clerical roles.”
Yet if the jobs were incidental, why rush to rehire them?
“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.”
According to CNN, the purge included NNSA staff on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build the weapons and inspect them once they’re complete.
Others fired include officials who set requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime [sic] to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
“Congress is freaking out because it appears DOGE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile,” a source told CNN. “The nuclear deterrent is the backbone of American security and stability – period. For there to be any even very small holes poked even in the maintenance of that deterrent should be extremely frightening to people.”
One of the hardest hit plants was Pantex near Amarillo, Texas, where reportedly 30 percent of the cuts were directed. Employees there work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons workforce, with the highest levels of clearance.
Many of those fired lost access to email before being notified they were fired until they showed up Friday and were locked out of their offices.
The firings were part of a bureaucratic reshuffling led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Musk was given the job seemingly as a reward after he spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump re-elected. Musk and his young DOGE aides have been wreaking havoc at agencies throughout the bureaucracy, firing staff and freezing spending already approved by Congress (directed to farmers, for instance, who planned on those federal dollars). The dramatic overhaul has resulted in several lawsuits being brought against the Trump administration.
Once news spread of the NNSA firings, Trump critics couldn’t help but point out the incompetence that could’ve had far more dramatic consequences.
“Accidentally firing the people in charge of the nukes! Whoops!” journalist Molly Jong-Fast posted Sunday on X.
A self-described Army veteran tweeted that the Trump administration is making it “embarrassing to be an American.”
“Trump and Musk are making America weaker, not stronger,” he wrote. “I never seen an incompetent team in the Oval Office like this.”
