America is planning to spend around $2 trillion over the next 30 years to upgrade its nuclear weapons systems. Protecting and maintaining the existing U.S. stockpile of more than 5,000 nukes is an expensive job that requires specially trained people with niche degrees and interests. DOGE cuts have gotten rid of hundreds of those people.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been slashing through the federal workforce without much thought for the consequences. 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.
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.
It’ll be significantly harder now. “Cutting experts in nuclear security at the very moment when the US is replacing its entire nuclear arsenal is foolish. This ambitious undertaking already has serious risks and proceeding with fewer qualified specialists makes it more likely that something will go awry, potentially endangering public safety,” John Carl Baker, Deputy Director of Programs at the Ploughshares Fund, told Gizmodo.
Among the lost is Kyle Fowler, the director of the NNSA’s Office of Strategic Materials Production Modernization. Fowler’s office was part of an office that worked on enriching uranium. The ore is critical for the production of weapons and power plants but American production has lagged behind major producers like Russia, Canada, and Kazakhstan. Three countries with which the U.S. hasn’t been on great terms.
Also gone is Lina Cordero who worked on modernizing plutonium pit production. Plutonium pits are the core piece of a nuclear weapon and a critical component of the Sentinel-class missiles the U.S. wants to stick in all those new silos. Manufacturing them is a bit of a lost art. The Los Alamos National Laboratory made exactly one last year and it was a big enough deal that they issued a press release about it.
Those new missiles will need pits and the plan is to ramp up production and produce 30 to 50 a year by 2028. But Los Alamos only produced a few pits between 2007 and 2011 and then stopped. The U.S. hasn’t manufactured pits at scale since 1989. Why did we stop? The Rocky Flats plant outside of Denver Colorado made most of the cores. It was a nightmare of nuclear waste so horrifying that the FBI raided the place in 1989 and shut it down.
Rocky Flats is so poisonous that the EPA has deemed it a Superfund site. After the raid, the FBI discovered 62 pounds of plutonium in ventilation systems. Radiation levels in some areas of the plant were so high that Geiger counters could not register it. Rates of cancer and infant mortality in the surrounding community were enormous.
As plans move forward to ramp up plutonium production in New Mexico and South Carolina, federal courts and local communities have pushed back. They need to know it’ll be different this time, that another Rocky Flats won’t happen. Thanks to DOGE, many of the people who could help answer that question are gone.
The bulk of the DOE’s nuclear work is done by around 60,000 contract workers. The people who build the missiles, dig the silos, and construct submarines are people working for a federal contractor. The DOE told the Times that those workers have been exempt from cuts. And that may be true, but a lot of the people who oversee those workers are gone.
You’ll be shocked to hear that American defense contractors aren’t always on their best behavior. They don’t always have their workers’ best interest at heart nor are they great at saving taxpayer money. The Sentinel nuclear weapons program that will see the country dig 450 new silos is 81% over budget. There’s no guarantee costs won’t climb.
Northrop Grumman is building the missile and employs thousands of contractors to get it done. In 2023, two people working for Northrop Grumman at a plant in Magna, Utah where it makes ballistic missiles—including the Sentinel—died on the job. The two men suffocated due to an argon leak in the room they worked in, a known problem in that particular part of the plan. The contractor will avoid criminal prosecution for the deaths.
Donald Trump has said he wants to denuclearize but the nuclear weapons industrial complex has a habit of grinding forward. There is so much money on the line and so many jobs at stake, that it’s hard to imagine a future where he ends the production of nukes in America. What he has done, through DOGE, is make an already expensive and unsafe industry far more dangerous and costly.
