Bulwark Takes - DOGE Goes Nuclear and Fires DOE Staff in Charge of Our Own Nuclear Weapons

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

Tim Miller REACTS to another DOGE mistake. They fired nuclear staff without really knowing what they did, and then tried to rehire them. Outrageous!

Hey y'all, it's Tim Miller from The Bulwark. This one was just too delicious to go by. I had to make sure everybody saw it. Shout out to the folks over at CNN for the exclusive on this. Get this. The crack team at Doge, the Trump officials, fired nuclear staff without realizing their job was to oversee our country's nuclear weapons stockpile. And after coming to the awareness that these people didn't just have kind of pointless government jobs, they went to unfire them. They're like, oops, sorry, guys, we did an oopsie. We didn't mean to fire the nuclear staff.

We just didn't know what the Energy Department did. Oopsie doopsie, our bad. Hope that wasn't wrong. That's essentially how we are running the government right now. A couple of the delicious details from CNN. For starters, the Trump administration doesn't even really deny this. An Energy Department spokesperson only said that it was less than 50 people that were dismissed. CNN's reporting it was 300. So they're not even saying, no, this didn't happen. They're saying, yeah, it's true that we accidentally fired some staff who oversee the nuclear weapons. But we fixed it. And it was only like four dozen people instead of a couple hundred. So that's their spin here. According to CNN, just some examples of the people that were fired, that we've got the staff that oversee the contractors who build the nuclear

weapons. It included employees who write the requirements and guidelines for those who build the nuclear weapons. It includes people that were on the ground working at these nuclear facilities. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because no one has taken any time to understand what people do and the importance of our work to the nation's national security. We should note this is an ongoing situation. One of the sources that talked to CNN said we don't actually know if everybody that got fired is returning or who exactly gets to return. You know, I guess shadow President Musk will get to decide that, or maybe, you know, a couple of Republicans in Congress who are fucking scared that we're getting rid of the staff that oversees our nuclear safety will shake the White House loose on this one and make sure everybody gets back into their gig. TBD, a funny tweet, I guess not funny, dark, dark comedy these days

from Pete Buttigieg. Even worse than incompetence, they accidentally fired, then apparently today, unfired hundreds of the people who manage America's nuclear weapons. More details on this shockingly sloppy episode. And then he links to this article. What a disaster. What a cluster. You know, we already know this. All of us have been monitoring this closely. We know this. But this is not a crack unit here. These are not folks that know what they're doing. This is a lot of incompetence. And this is carelessness. This is recklessness. And the reality is people are going to get hurt if they haven't been getting hurt already. maybe not in the nuclear vertical, but across all the other parts of the government where people are being fired haphazardly without any consideration for what it is they actually do here, to borrow a word from the office. So there's that.

There's our big weekend news update from CNN. Keep it here. Make sure to subscribe to the feed. We'll make sure you're seeing any important and critical breaking news on what's going on in this shit show that is Trump 2.0. So appreciate you guys. We'll see you soon. you