The Trump administration has halted the sackings of hundreds of US federal employees who worked on America’s nuclear weapons programmes.
The U-turn has left workers confused and led experts to warn that blind cost-cutting by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will put American communities at risk.
US officials said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to email before they learned they had been dismissed. Some tried to enter their offices on Friday morning, only to find they were locked out.
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.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, referencing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, said: “The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for.
“They don’t seem to realise that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons more than it is the Department of Energy.”
By late on 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“This letter serves as formal notification that the termination decision issued to you on February 13 2025 has been rescinded, effective immediately,” said the memo, which was obtained by the AP.
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”.
But that was not the case. The firings prompted one NNSA senior staffer to post a warning and call to action.
Deputy division director Rob Plonski posted to LinkedIn: “This is a pivotal moment. We must decide whether we are truly committed to leading on the world stage or if we are content with undermining the very systems that secure our nation’s future.
“Cutting the federal workforce responsible for these functions may be seen as reckless at best and adversarily opportunistic at worst.”
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 did not directly work on weapons programmes.
This included managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there does not 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.
US representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and US senator 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 programmes had spent their entire careers there, and there was a wave of retirements in recent years that cost the agency years of institutional knowledge.
It is now in the midst of a major 750 billion dollar (£595 billion) nuclear weapons modernisation 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.
He said: “I think the signal to US adversaries is pretty clear: throw a monkey wrench in the whole national security apparatus and cause disarray.
“That can only benefit the adversaries of this country.”
