Amid the tumult of mass firings, the Trump administration’s dismissal of workers who maintain America’s nuclear weapons delivered perhaps the greatest shock. These are people with highly sensitive jobs, the Energy Department would later acknowledge, who should have never been fired.
Almost all the workers were rehired in an embarrassing about-face, a prominent example of how the administration has had to reverse dismissals in multiple instances where its scattershot approach caused deeper damage to agencies than anticipated.
Yet late the night before Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration perfunctorily fired 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce, over the strenuous objections of senior nuclear officials.
A stream of panicked calls from lawmakers of both political parties led to rapid reinstatement of most of the 314 nuclear engineers, technicians and managers who had been fired via email. But not before the incident inflicted chaos and confusion within the 1,800-person agency, illuminating the dangers of applying Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” playbook to government agencies that have deadly serious missions.
At the nuclear agency, the initial firings were so haphazard that entire divisions are still reeling, said current and former agency staff. Like other agency and administration employees interviewed by The Washington Post and quoted in this article, the employees spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.
Paradoxically, the administration’s rush to notch firings quickly was seen as a missed opportunity by outside specialists and critics who argue the agency needs an overhaul. Nuclear hawks say the operation is mired in red tape that hampers efforts to modernize the arsenal. Plans for replacing old warheads and innovating weapons designs are far behind schedule and over budget.
“The NNSA is failing,” said Robert Peters, a research fellow focused on nuclear weapons at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Most of the weapons in the arsenal are older than the average American.”
But the firings did not appear to be driven by a plan to improve the agency. Instead, department leaders compiled a list of all the people who could be fired because they were in their probationary period of employment, and then terminated most of them. The list included many highly specialized experts with advanced degrees who had recently been promoted from another position or joined the agency from the private sector, according to administration officials who were involved.
A chaotic rehiring process began after the complaints.
The department could not initially reach some of the employees. It had locked them out of their computers and frozen their work email accounts, and supervisors scrambled to locate personal contact information, several current and former employees told The Post.