The Scoop
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency is reviewing the National Nuclear Security Administration’s contractors, raising fears within the agency responsible for the country’s nuclear arsenal that it could lose mission-critical staff, two agency officials and a person familiar with the matter told Semafor.
Department heads have been asked to justify the roles of the contractors on their team in one-sentence summaries describing why they should be kept on, one of the officials working for the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, said.
The DOGE employees at NNSA are expected to categorize the roughly 1,400 support service contract employees as “keep, delete, or more information needed,” two of the people said.
The nuclear agency, which falls under the Department of Energy, was thrown into turmoil by the firing and partial rehiring of hundreds of staff in February, and current employees fear that contractors could be next in line to lose their jobs. Multiple current and former NNSA employees stressed that contractors are vital for the department’s work, and often have decades of experience dating back to the Cold War. They warned that the agency risked losing valuable know-how at a time when its mission is rapidly expanding, as the US seeks to modernize its nuclear arsenal.
“I can’t think of a single office where there wouldn’t be some level of [support service] contractors that would be essential for completing that mission,” Scott Roecker, a former senior NNSA official, told Semafor. “It would have a really significant, negative impact” if they were to be terminated, Roecker added.
Roecker said contracting staff at the agency are involved in virtually every part of the NNSA’s mission, including tasks such as ensuring nuclear material is properly guarded and is not being diverted or smuggled internationally.
“The Department of Energy is reviewing all contracts,” a spokesperson for the department said, adding that the evaluation “will not impede the Department’s ability to conduct its critical mission of protecting our national security and nuclear deterrence in the development, modernization, and stewardship of America’s atomic weapons enterprise, including the peaceful use of nuclear technology and nonproliferation.”
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The review is part of the administration’s broader effort to scrutinize government spending. DOGE has terminated more than 30,000 federal employees, while roughly 75,000 more resigned as part of its “Fork in the Road” program — and sweeping cuts are expected at agencies like the departments of State, Defense, and Veterans Affairs. DOGE has loudly celebrated its cost-cutting initiatives, posting an online “wall of receipts” to show how much it has saved by canceling federal contracts. It claims to have saved $105 billion, but that number is impossible to verify because DOGE has published a breakdown of only a small portion of those savings. The list has also contained major errors that have inflated the calculated savings by billions.
DOGE has embraced Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos, disrupting a federal government used to operating at a more cautious pace. The strategy has triggered national security concerns, including whether unvetted DOGE staffers are accessing classified information, whether foreign adversaries could recruit disaffected federal employees, and whether the cuts will impact key national security personnel.
“The President has been very clear that he intends to do a top-to-bottom review of every taxpayer dollar that is going to fund this government,” a senior White House official told Semafor. “To any national security concerns or any implications to the good work that a lot of these agencies and departments are doing, all it is is a review.”
The White House official added that there is “an argument to be had that contractors are probably more useful than expanding the bureaucracy with more public sector workers, but the reality is, just because you’re a contractor doesn’t mean you’re absolved from waste, fraud or abuse.”
The NNSA served as an unlikely early target for the administration’s cost-cutting personnel reviews. The agency is responsible for overseeing a $200 billion nuclear modernization push, building the plutonium pits that are the backbone of America’s deterrence, maintaining 5,000 nuclear warheads, and monitoring nuclear threats worldwide — tasks that make it busier now than at any point since the Cold War. The agency’s responsibilities have also grown much faster than its budget and personnel.
Many congressional Republicans have long argued that the NNSA should have a bigger budget and more staff, as it continues to struggle to build more than one plutonium pit per year and upgrade its Manhattan Project-era facilities.
While some former NNSA employees agree that the agency needs reform, few expected the chaos that has beset the agency as part of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting blitz. On Feb. 13, almost 20% of the agency’s workforce was abruptly fired. Some employees still had working key cards, a former official said, while others had government laptops and devices — raising potential counterintelligence risks.
As criticism over firing more than 300 officials responsible for the country’s nuclear secrets mounted, the agency reinstated the majority of the staff — but not all. Current and former workers chafed over the Department of Energy’s statement that it was primarily people in “administrative or clerical roles,” who were not brought back, noting that employees involved in the secure transportation of nuclear goods, modernization, and nuclear supply chains had also been terminated.
Notable
- DOGE’s push to fire probationary employees means getting rid of younger, “more technologically savvy people,” while ultimately leaving longtime employees entrenched in their departments untouched, the Institute for Progress’s Santi Ruiz argued.
- The firing and rehiring at NNSA sparked concern among congressional Republicans, the Washington Post reported.
- President Donald Trump reined in Elon Musk’s DOGE at a recent cabinet meeting, per Politico.