Washington – The Trump administration has interrupted the layoffs of hundreds of federal employees who have been responsible for working on the country’s nuclear weapons programs, in an evolution that has left confused workers and experts endangering the reduction in blind costs de Doge will endanger communities.
Three American officials who spoke to the Associated Press said that up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration had been suddenly licensed Thursday Thursday, with some access to email on Friday morning to find out that they were locked up. The officials spoke under the cover of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
One of the hardest offices was the Pantex factory near Amarillo, Texas, which saw around 30% of the cuts. These employees are working to rest on warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs in the company of nuclear weapons, with the highest levels of release.
The hundreds of people released at the NNSA were part of a Doge purge through the Ministry of Energy which targeted around 2,000 employees.
“The Doge People knows absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” said Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, referring to the team of the Elon Musk government. “They do not seem to realize that it is in fact more the ministry of nuclear weapons than the Ministry of Energy.”
Late Friday evening, the agency’s interim director, Teresa Robbins, published a memo canceling the layoffs for all except 28 of these hundreds of licensed staff.
“This letter serves as an official notification according to which the termination decision which made you on February 13, 2025 was canceled, with effect immediately,” said the note, which was obtained by the AP.
The accounts of the three officials contradict an official declaration of the Ministry of Energy, who declared that less than 50 staff members of the National Nuclear Security Administration have been released, calling them “probationary employees” who “mainly occupied administrative roles and office ”.
But that was not the case. The layoffs prompted higher NNSA staff to display a warning and a call for action.
“It’s a pivotal moment. We must decide whether we are really determined to lead on the world scene or if we are just undergoing the very systems that guarantee the future of our nation, “published the deputy director of the Rob Plonski division on LinkedIn. “The reduction of the federal workforce responsible for these functions can be considered to be reckless at best and adversary to the worst opportunist.”
While some of the employees of the energy department who have been dismissed have dealt with energy efficiency and the effects of climate change, problems that are not considered priorities by the Trump administration, many others have Treaty of nuclear problems, even if they did not work directly on arms programs. This included the management of massive radioactive waste sites and the material guarantee does not contaminate neighboring communities any more.
This includes Savannah River National Laboratory in Jackson, South Carolina; Hanford’s nuclear site in the state of Washington, where workers guarantee 177 high -level laces reservoirs of previous work on the site producing plutonium for the atomic bomb; And the Oak Ridge reserve in Tennessee, a superfund contamination site where a large part of the first works on the Manhattan project was carried out, among others.
The American representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and the American senator Patty Murray of Washington, both Democrats, called the layoffs last week “totally insensitive and dangerous”.
The staff of the NNSA who had been reinstated could not all be joined after their dismissal, and some reconsidered the opportunity to return to work, given the uncertainty created by Doge.
Many federal employees who had worked on the country’s nuclear programs had spent their entire career there, and there was a wave of retirement in recent years which cost the years of institutional knowledge.
But it is now in the midst of a large effort to modernize nuclear weapons of $ 750 billion – including new terrestrial intercontinental ballistic missiles, new stealth bombers and new warheads launched by submarine. In response, the laboratories have aggressively hired in recent years: in 2023, 60% of the workforce had been there for five years or less.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear security at the Union of Scientists concerned, said that layoffs could disrupt the agency’s daily operation and create a feeling of instability on the nuclear program in the country and abroad.
“I think the signal for us the opponents is quite clear: to throw a wrench throughout the national security apparatus and cause dismay,” he said. “This can only benefit the opponents of this country.”
