Elon Musk’s DOGE has been slashing through the federal workforce without much thought. A new report from The New York Times details how bad the cuts have been to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a subsection of the Department of Energy that handles America’s nuclear weapons. Via Gizmodo:
The NNSA made news in February when DOGE fired more than 300 of its staffers only to send them panicked emails rescinding the layoffs after it realized they oversaw the nuclear stockpile. At the time, spokespeople for the DOE told news outlets that less than 50 people had been dismissed and that most of them were clerical and admin types.
According to the Times, the number is much higher and the losses far greater. The DOGE cuts did not begin with layoffs but with buyout offers. More than 130 people working on nukes took those offers. The Times also said 27 people were fired and not re-hired. The list included “at least 27 engineers, 13 program or project analysts, 12 program or project managers, six budget analysts or accountants, five physicists or scientists, as well as attorneys, compliance officers and technologists, according to internal lists,” according to the Times.
The plan to spend around $20 billion a year modernizing nuclear weapons will be slowed down by these cuts. The plan was for the U.S. to construct new missile silos across multiple states, build new nuclear missiles to place in those silos, and churn out new nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines. Working on nukes requires a specialized set of skills. The U.S. industrial base isn’t set up to do it and it was going to cost a lot of money to get the whole thing moving again.
Huh. It’s almost as if they want the U.S. to be more vulnerable to Russia.
