Inside DOGE’s Dumbest Cut Yet
Last week’s hastily reversed firings at the National Nuclear Security Administration have left a reeling, rattled agency in their wake.
Andrew had meant to spend yesterday soaking in the sights and sounds at CPAC, but found himself tied up reporting our lead story below. So he missed Vice President JD Vance’s culture-war ruminations, Steve Bannon’s calls for a third Trump term in 2028 (and coy was-it-or-wasn’t-it Roman salute), and Elon Musk brandishing a chainsaw and wearing giant sunglasses indoors while stammering demands to “legalize comedy.” Bummer!
He’ll be there today, though. And if that’s not the scene for you, you can catch a bunch of the Bulwark gang in D.C. this weekend at Principles First. Happy Friday.
Department of Bad Decisions
by Andrew Egger
The Department of Energy spent this week trying to contain the fallout from its DOGE-directed firing and rehiring of a brace of nuclear safety officials by painting them as non-critical staff who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles.”
But this wasn’t close to true, current and recently retired NNSA employees tell The Bulwark. In fact, one of the officials who was locked out of his work accounts was Acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency.
Todd did not respond to a request for comment. But he wasn’t the only mission-critical employee swept up in the purge.
At the agency’s Los Alamos field office alone, there was the site’s emergency preparedness manager, who is responsible for maintaining plans to minimize the effects of a nuclear accident on site and in surrounding areas. There was the radiation protection manager, responsible for minimizing radiation exposure to on-site workers. There was the security manager, the fire protection engineer, and two facility representatives, who are the office’s day-to-day eyes and ears on site manufacturing facilities.
Media reports have treated the firings as a deeply unwise DOGE hatchet job that was, thankfully, quickly reversed. And it’s true that earlier this week, nearly all the affected employees were notified that they were welcome back at their jobs. But at the Los Alamos nuclear facility and across NNSA, shell-shocked employees remain unsure whether or how soon the axe might fall again. Many, sources say, are now eyeing early retirement or thinking about finding other work.
The episode represents the clearest illustration to date of the potential real-world repercussions of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn project. The federal government, Musk and his DOGE lackeys believe, is so engorged, overstaffed, and loaded with fat that you can reduce headcounts basically at random. The real world doesn’t operate that way—especially when nuclear waste is involved.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, famously the main development site for the first ever nuclear bomb, conducts research in many fields today. But it retains a critical role in our nuclear program as the sole U.S. manufacturing site for plutonium pits—a core component both for building new nukes and refurbishing aging ones.
Most of the on-site staff at Los Alamos aren’t federal employees. They’re contractors—14,000 of them from a private company, Triad National Security. The NNSA field office is tasked with supervising and directing the contractors’ work to ensure it remains in compliance with federal regulations and safety standards and that the material they produce is in alignment with the government’s national security directives.
“These are the people who, if they’re gone, all the signatures that need to go onto documents and all the approvals that need to go before you can start the work doesn’t happen,” a recently retired NNSA senior technical adviser told The Bulwark. “It’s like building a house: You’ve got the contractor out there ready to build the house, but if you haven’t got the permits from the county, nothing’s gonna get built.”
They’re also understaffed as it is. A 2023 internal administrative assessment of the field office put the optimal number of employees at 126. At current federal spending levels, they’re allowed to retain a staff of 97. Going into this year, the office was sitting at 85. (It’s not so easy, luring highly skilled post-doc specialists to the relatively ascetic life of the New Mexico desert.)
The office had been working to staff up recently, though, in large part because of a recent federal directive to ramp up production of plutonium pits as part of a broader effort to modernize our nuclear arsenal. That effort crashed into its first obstacle on Inauguration Day, when Trump froze nearly all civilian hiring across the entire federal government. Things got worse following DOGE’s “Fork in the Road” buyout offer, which a handful of senior staff opted to take.
Even so, remaining field-office staff weren’t particularly worried that their own jobs might be in jeopardy. Their highly specialized work protecting and equipping America’s nuclear arsenal seemed . . . important.
Moreover, Trump’s workforce-reduction orders had mostly come with carveouts for national security positions. As one Los Alamos official told The Bulwark: “Being that we’re the National Nuclear Security Administration, everyone kind of assumed—you put ‘nuclear’ in between those, it’s not gonna make it less important.”
When DOGE started hacking away at other departments, NNSA leadership put in a request for an agency exemption, then put it out of their minds. And that was the last they heard of it—until last week. Now, morale agencywide is “through the floor,” another NNSA employee said. “Leadership is scared of speaking out about things—you know, the nail that sticks out is gonna get hammered down.”
In response to a list of questions, Department of Energy Press Secretary Ben Dietderich sent a statement reiterating that “President Trump and the Department of Energy are committed to making government more accountable, efficient, and restoring proper stewardship of the American taxpayer’s dollars,” and noting that the fired and rehired employees “held primarily administrative roles.” A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to a request for comment.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Bulwark in a statement that “There are a number of bureaucrats who are resistant to the democratic process and mandate delivered by the American people. President Trump is only interested in the best and most qualified people who are also willing to implement his America First Agenda on behalf of the American people. It’s not for everyone, and that’s okay.”1
Staff at NNSA are now bracing for further setbacks—either in the form of a reduction of force order or through simple attrition. Some senior staff have already taken Musk’s resignation offer; others are now contemplating moving up their retirements. Thanks to the hiring freeze, when they go, they can’t be replaced, and they’re taking a lifetime of intensely specialized knowledge out the door.
Every current and former NNSA employee who spoke to The Bulwark was alarmed about the possibilities of this sort of brain drain, fretting that Musk and his tech-bro buds simply didn’t realize how unsuited the “turn everything off and see what breaks” model was to their line of work. It might work with Twitter. But the stakes are a bit different, and the challenges more complex, when you are talking about the safe handling and proper maintenance of America’s nuclear arsenal.
“The skill set is so narrowly specific that there might be five guys in the entire U.S. who can do it,” said one employee. “And you might have just fired one, two or three are retired, and the other is based somewhere else in the U.S. and doesn’t want to move. So you’re hosed.”
A New Tea Party?
by William Kristol
Sixteen years ago, on February 19, 2009, reporting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and cheered on by traders standing around him, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli called for a revolt—what he called a “Chicago Tea Party”—against the bank bailout and government spending measures of the new Obama administration.
Last night, on February 20, 2025, Republican Congressman Rich McCormick, re-elected with 65 percent of the vote three months ago, was startled to be greeted with boos and catcalls at a packed town hall meeting in Roswell, Georgia, by constituents objecting to the government-decimating policies of the Trump-Musk administration.
As Greg Bluestein, who was there, reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, McCormick’s constituents repeatedly challenged him, interrupted his answers, and shouted comments like “We’re pissed” and “Don’t bend over.”
One questioner, citing recent cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in nearby Atlanta, asked, “Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?”
McCormick’s unsatisfactory answer? “A lot of the work they do is duplicitous2 with AI.”
At another point, McCormick claimed that agencies were making their own decisions on personnel cuts. Members of the audience shouted “No!” with one person shouting, “Elon Musk is deciding.”
Another constituent posed a more fundamental challenge to her elected representative:
It’s clear from all the writings of our Founding Fathers that our great republic was never meant to be ruled by a dictator or a king. . . . Tyranny is rising in the White House and a man has declared himself our king, so I would like to know, rather, the people would like to know, what you, congressman, and your fellow congressmen are going to do to reign in the megalomaniac in the White House?
She received a standing ovation.
If you put this town hall together with the flurry of polls showing erosion in support for Trump and his agenda, you might discern the beginnings of some grounds of hope.
The bad news, of course, is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and Russ Vought and Stephen Miller, and Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth are meanwhile tightening their grip on power, removing established guardrails, eroding the rule of law, and eviscerating major parts of the federal government while politicizing and weaponizing others. And the Republican Congress—including the aforementioned Rep. McCormick—is cheering them along.
But the public may be beginning to rise up in protest. Perhaps some “leaders” will follow.
Quick Hits
KASH, BONDI, NO’S!!!!: The Senate confirmed Kash Patel to be director of the FBI yesterday by a vote of 51–49. At time of writing, the windbreakers have yet to show up at The Bulwark’s offices.
On the homepage, Will Saletan points out that, with this confirmation, Trump’s election-denial trifecta—JD Vance, Pam Bondi, and Patel—is now complete:
Patel’s confirmation, secured Thursday afternoon by Republicans in the Senate, completes Trump’s installation of proven collaborators in key positions overseeing our election system. The people who said no to Trump’s lies in 2020 and 2021—Pence, Barr, and Wray—are out. They’ve been replaced by people who affirmed those lies and stand ready to do so again: Vance, Bondi, and Patel. Team Coup, if called upon, is ready.
MOVING MONEY AROUND: President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have both promised to “rebuild our military.” On its face, it’s not such a ridiculous suggestion: In recent years, personnel costs have accounted for a growing part of the Pentagon’s budget; the United States is spending relatively little on defense as a percentage of GDP by historical standards; and our main rivals are spending way more on their own militaries than they’re admitting. Even Lloyd Austin said that the DoD budget should be north of $900 billion.
But, uh, that’s not exactly what Trump and Hegseth have in mind. Per the Washington Post:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post and officials familiar with the matter—a striking proposal certain to face internal resistance and strident bipartisan opposition in Congress.
But wait, there’s more:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed Pentagon officials to find about $50 billion in the Biden administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal that can be redirected to new priorities, according to a late-Wednesday statement by his acting deputy.
Funds should be moved from “so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs” and “excessive bureaucracy” to Trump-administration priorities, such as securing the border, building an “Iron Dome” for the United States, and ending DEI programs, acting deputy defense secretary Robert Salesses said in the statement.
Shall we enumerate a few of the ways this is dubious?
Are these cuts or merely reallocations? No one seems to know for sure.
This is pretty small-ball as far as numbers go. Not nearly enough, for example, to build an “Iron Dome” over the entire United States.
It’s also curious, given all the attention on “government efficiency,” that the actual waste and abuse in the Pentagon budget didn’t rank among Hegseth’s top priorities. But maybe that’s because Trump fired the guy responsible for finding that waste and abuse.
SPEAKING OF EFFICIENCY: What could be more efficient than buying things in $1 increments? That seems to be the logic behind DOGE’s latest galaxy-brained idea, as reported by Wired:
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency put a $1 spending limit on most credit cards belonging to employees and contractors of the General Services Administration—a critical agency that manages IT and buildings for the US government—along with at least three other federal agencies. Similar restrictions are expected to rollout to the entire government workforce soon, according to several sources familiar with the matter.
Between this, DOGE’s insistence that USAID employees pay for their own relocation expenses, and the order that all government agencies cancel subscriptions to services like Westlaw and the Bloomberg Terminal, the unifying theory seems to be that the only way the government can save money is by forcing government employees to pay for business expenses out of pocket.
Cheap Shots
It’s nice to know America is being respected again.
Correction (February 27, 10:00 a.m. EST): The White House responded to a request for comment before publication. Due to an internal miscommunication, however, we failed to include their comment in the initial version of this newsletter. We have added that comment and regret the error.
(Sic.)
"Last night, on February 20, 2025, Republican Congressman Rich McCormick, reelected with 65 percent of the vote three months ago, was startled to be greeted with boos and catcalls at a packed town hall meeting in Roswell, Georgia, by constituents objecting to the government-decimating policies of the Trump-Musk administration."
I'm sorry, but if your district gave a Republican 65% of the vote, you are getting exactly what you voted for right now. The GOP has lusted over reducing the federal government for a while now, and that's what you Tea Party jerks have been voting for for 15 years. When it was performative and you didn't have the power to do any of this, this district was surely cheering it on. Now that you're getting what you voted for, you're blaming the guy you elected, at 65%, for doing the sorts of things he said he would do. These people come into these Town Halls sounding so articulate; how can you sound so articulate but act like you didn't know this was what you were voting for? Are Democrats really so bad that they're worse than this? I'm not mad at McCormick; I'm pissed at his constituents.
I’m still waiting on the judge to ask the lawyers who is lying? Is it the president when he says Musk is heading up DOGE? Or is the attorneys saying he isn’t? These two things can’t be true at the same time.