Bulwark Takes - DOGE’s DUMBEST Firing Yet

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Sam Stein talks to Andrew Egger about his article Inside DOGE’s Dumbest Cut Yet. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/inside-doges-dumbest-cut-yet

Hey guys, me Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bulwark, here with Andrew Egger, who is live on the CPAC floor. There's like a 55 to 65% chance his internet goes out. And then there's a 30% chance that the J6 choir starts singing right behind him. So if that happens, that's great. And if the 5% chance is that we get this done correctly, so be it. In the meantime, subscribe to the feed. Andrew, first off, before we get to your story, which is what we're here to talk about, about this inexplicably dumb doge cuts at Los Alamos, which if you're worried about nuclear safety, not the best cuts to make. Before we do

that, tell us what's CPAC like? Yeah. So, you know, we're a small outfit here at the Bulwark. You finish up one story, you go herring off to the next, uh, so, you know, we're, we're, we're a small outfit here at the Bulwark. You finish up one story, uh, you go herring off to the next one. Uh, and then, you know, while you're there, you try to do the video content for the last story for the YouTube page. Uh, I haven't even been in yet. I've just, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of outside of the exhibitor hall where all of the mega lifestyle brands, um, you know, hawk their wares and raise, raise awareness. I've seen a lot of, you interesting people walk by hans von spakovsky of the heritage foundation you know how it is at cpac the heavy hitters um guys like that uh but uh but yeah you know we're gonna we're gonna do a day at cpac and see how it is you're supposed to do it yesterday but then this story happened

yeah okay so let's talk about the story um first of all uh i think the context here is important which is doge has been going around cutting basically everything uh minus a few key agencies that they're supposedly getting to um and then trying to figure out if they fucked up uh and oftentimes they have and they've had to bring people back uh on board who they cut we knew uh prior to today that they had done the same at this nuclear safety agency. What's the name of the agency? It's the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is a subset of the Department of Energy. And they basically handle a lot of the nuclear safety management of our current nuclear stockpile, as well as a lot of them. Well, they're involved with a lot of the manufacture of new nuclear components,

both to refurbish the nukes that we already have and to build new ones. All right. So we knew that they made these cuts and we knew that they had frantically tried to rehire a lot of these people and their portrayal of this, this is the Doge folks, their portrayal of this was, oh, you know, the people we cut were not critical, but we, you know, so nothing was, we were never in too much danger. They were primarily administrative people. But that wasn't the case, according to your reporting. Tell us what the actual story is. Yeah. So this is, I mean, this is kind of a remarkable thing because, because this whole story kind of blew up last week.

Right. Where where everyone just realized that there were these there had been these cuts at this at this extremely critical sub sub agency of the know, the administration quickly backtracked and quickly at the beginning of this week sent sent, you know, rehire notices to a lot of these people. To nearly all of them, almost all of them and nearly all of the ones who got those notices have come back on. And so kind of the narrative has been, wow, that sure was a screw up. But at least, you know, says the Department of Energy, it was really just kind of a handful of sort of clerical and administrative employees. And, and, you know, it's just kind of a thing that happened in the past. And we're all kind of back to normal now. But I've been talking to, you know, a number of current and former officials at NSSA for the last couple of days. And the picture that they give is very different.

First of all, they are, they find it kind of like a bad joke, this idea that these are kind of low functioning, or not low functioning, but low level, kind of clerical pencil pushing employees. It's kind of true in the sense that their whole role at these nuclear manufacturer sites like Los Alamos in New Mexico is administrative. These are sites that are essentially all of the on-the-ground stuff is done not by government

employees at all. It's done by independent contractors. But they are the eyes and ears of the federal government at those sites to direct the work and to ensure that it's always in accordance with all federal safety standards, all just kind of operational standards, and just make sure they're doing what the Department of Defense wants them to be doing, essentially, what the Department of Energy wants them to be doing as well. And so when these cuts came through, as they have at many agencies, they essentially hit everybody who was probationary. And in fact,

it was a little bit more, we don't need to get into it, but a little bit more chaotic even than that. There were some people who weren't even like really probationary, according to the sense that it's actually legal to fire them, they were, they were kind of thought of as probationary, they got on lists for different reasons. But the most striking of all of these people, and just to kind of give you a sense of it, is that the acting chief of defense nuclear safety at the entire agency is a guy named James Todd. He was one of the people who found himself locked out of his systems at the end of last week when all these purges went through. Now, it's a little unclear. And just let me say that again. This is the top authority at

the entire National Nuclear Security Administration, the top authority for everything related to nuclear safety at that agency. So this is kind of an important guy, right? It's a little unclear because there's so much fog of war with all this, whether he was ever like, quote unquote, supposed to be one of these guys who was fired. And you get into like, what does supposed to be even mean? Like none of it's really supposed to be happening. There's no real sense that any of it's legal. It's just these guys who are going around like slashing and burning. And he was one of the guys who got slashed and burned, right? He was one of the guys who got locked out of the system, who was then kind of very hurriedly brought back at the beginning of this week. He's not somebody

who talked to me for the story. But I think like that, that he was, you know, one of the people involved is really, really a striking thing. What kind of panic did it send throughout the agency when they saw that James Todd and others at relatively similar levels had been locked out. Well, what's crazy is, I mean, I mentioned the word, like the term fog of war a minute ago. A lot of people didn't even really know who all had been locked out because there were no like kind of, you know, agency wide, you know, announcements about all who all had

and had not gotten the dissent. People kind of knew who the probationary employees were, right. Um, the ones who, you know, were the, were the legitimate probationary employees, the, the, the new people who'd been there for less than a year. Um, but so, so, so they kind of had a sense of going in who was likely to get the ax, but there was, there was never any kind of, um, you know, sidewide notice or agency wide notice. And, and, you know, when people would get the acts, they'd immediately be locked out of systems and then they couldn't communicate. Right. And it's, and it became, you know, it was, it was hard to know who all was who, but, but, but, uh, I mean, even, even, even among kind of

the quote unquote normal probationary employees, there's still like a bunch of people who are like incredibly mission critical staff at these different field offices. And I zoomed in on the field office at Los Alamos. The site's emergency preparedness manager was a probationary employee. A guy who maintains plans to minimize the effects of a nuclear accident on site. Their radiation protection manager was a probationary employee. security manager, the fire protection engineer, two of their facility representatives who are kind of like on-site, you know, supervisors of the contractors and kind of eyes and ears for the agency, like on the floor there. And these are all people who just like kind of were kind of like in a horror movie, just sort of snatched up by the beast at the end of last week.

By the doge. Yeah. And with very little warning, by the way, because I should also say this, that, that, you know, they're kind of understanding as early as the beginning of last week, uh, their, their assumption, right. I should say was that they were not going to be affected by, by these cuts because a lot of, um, a lot of it's all been very foggy. I keep saying this because this is true across the federal government, but, but one keeps saying, yeah, but, but one big, one big thing in all this is that in theory, immigration enforcement, law enforcement, national security officials are not subject to a lot of this stuff,

at least according to the initial executive order. So they kind of all thought, well, we're unbelievably important nuclear safety workers. We'll probably be fine. So let's talk about that for a second, because Los Alamos National Laboratory is the development site for the first ever nuclear bomb, obviously. It still conducts research today. They have storage of nuclear plutonium pits, as I understand it. So it's a serious place, obviously. They actually manufacture those plutonium pits on site at that laboratory, and they're

the only laboratory that does it. Gotcha. So I guess my, my, it's not a question. Like if you, this is the type of thing where if you sort of knew about the subject matter a bit more, or if you knew how government operated in this field a bit more, if you had taken some time rather than a couple of weeks to just sort of go through the probationary employees and slash them all away, you might've been like, Ooh, that's not a good idea like we can't just you know find people to like fill in here uh because this is a highly technical highly specialized line of work that also happens to be in the middle of fucking nowhere new mexico um

but that wasn't what happened there's no indication that any research or homework or outreach was done in advance to figure out who would be the best people if you had to cut to cut from this agency. At least that's my read of it. Is that your read of it? Absolutely. Especially as this thing that happened last week. Now they are, there's a lot of kind of fear and anxiety among the workforce right now that such uh kind of more detailed force reduction could still be coming down the pipe where they they try to do go where they do try to go with a little bit more of a scalpel the problem is that this we're talking about field offices here and again i just zoomed in on the one at los alamos um but but field

offices that are already working kind of significantly below capacity. I mean, this is an office that has a, officials to move out to the middle of nowhere in New Mexico and commute an hour through the desert to get to this like highly classified facility that you can't bring your smartphone into. And you know what I mean? Like it's a tough sell to get people there in the first place. And what they've been doing as they've been going through these agencies is not only a hiring freeze on all new civilian staff or staff positions, but also, you know, when, when they've gone through and had people take the buyouts or, or gone through with these doge purges, they've just eliminated all of the positions as the person goes out the door. And it's like, it's like this

insane Kafka-esque thing where like you, I mean, like the, the, the top guy there, like imagine if that, if that if that stayed there what you're just not gonna have like a a head of safety for nuclear stuff at the nuclear safety agency anymore yeah um so it's i mean you move fast and you break things and you have a little nuclear yeah yeah so that's what i mean let see what happens. It's really kind of hard to even communicate just how sort of crestfallen and and unsettled and bemused all of these all of these employees are who, you know, there's, there have been people who have made comments to other outlets that, okay, well, you know, I wasn't planning on retiring, but now maybe that is going to be the best move for me and my career in the future. And I think the other thing that's so important to emphasize, this is a thing that these employees talked a lot about was just, it's not, I mean, like you're

talking about some of the most kind of like highly specialized technical work uh like that you could picture anywhere they don't there are no like kind of classes uh that you can take in college to kind of like prepare you to hit the ground running when they hire you to handle nuclear waste or to do nuclear security i mean one guy one guy i said hold on you go ahead hold on speak for yourself this is my side pursuit i have the i have the capacity to fill in if they yeah you gotta watch out all right look we gotta run you gotta run let me say one other thing was one of these guys said if you try to if you try to you know teach yourself about some of this stuff you know prior to coming to the agency that's how you get yourself on the list. So the worry is

brain drain. The worry is that you're kicking these people out. They're the only person who knows how to do it. You can't bring anybody in. And then it's just all awful forever. So that's exciting. That's the whole thing. And now I'll let you go, Sam. I know you have places to be. We'll have that to look forward to for sure. All right, Andrew, go back to your crappy Wi-Fi and your CPAC experience. You're going to see what you have. For folks who want to read the full piece, it's up on the site, but also you should subscribe, frankly, to Morning Shots. It's called Inside Doge's Dumbest Cut Yet.

Andrew, thanks a bunch, man. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Sam.