Trump’s Purge Hits Nuclear Weapons Agency—Setting Off National Crisis

There appears to be mass chaos at the agency responsible for keeping a “safe, secure, and reliable” watch over the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

ABC News is reporting that hundreds of employees at the 1,800-person National Nuclear Security Administration were fired on Thursday. Many of them described the situation as a “national security crisis.”

The Department of Energy then suddenly paused the firings on Friday, frantically calling back employees to tell them they still have a job.

“This is creating unbelievable threats to our national security. Trump, Musk, and DOGE are wiping out the employees who manage our nuclear arsenal,” attorney and former Ukrainian Armed Forces member John Jackson wrote on X. “Every time someone retires, there will be no one to fill their slot.”

The confusion comes as the Trump administration on Thursday directed agencies to fire thousands of probationary employees in the federal workforce. While Trump is framing these mass firings as commonsense fat-trimming, this seems to be a pure ideological war—with brutal consequences.

Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday establishing the “Make America Healthy Again Commission,” which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will chair. One virologist was quick to lay out multiple rhetorical quirks in the order that suggested an anti-vaccine agenda.

“Fortunately, I speak fluent anti-vax grifterese & can translate,” Dr. Angela Rasmussen wrote in an illuminating thread on X.

The order reflected many of Kennedy’s concerns as a vocal anti-vaccine advocate who has repeatedly pushed the long-debunked claim that vaccines lead to autism. During his confirmation hearing, Kennedy claimed he did not oppose vaccines but stressed studying the origins of chronic illness over researching infectious disease.

The executive order said that all research by all federal health agencies “should prioritize gold-standard research on the root causes of why Americans are getting sick.”

According to the “purpose” section of the order, this seemed to indicate research on “nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety” would be given priority. As Rasmussen put it, “vaccines, approved medications, processed food, lifestyle choices” were MAHA priorities.

The executive order established that within 100 days, the commission needed to submit a report assessing “the threat that potential over-utilization of medication,” among other things, poses to children.

The report would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.”

Rasmussen wrote that the order’s references to the issue of “increased prescription of medication” translated to the claim that “evidence-based medicine is bad” and that a supposed “over-reliance on medication and treatments” in the U.S. suggested a shift toward “replacing vaccines and drugs with supplements.” Further, the order stated that agencies must “ensure the availability of expanded treatment options,” making it clear alternative medicine is on the menu.

The order also established a policy where agencies must “work with farmers to ensure that United States food is the healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world.” During his Senate hearing, Kennedy had also pushed for stricter regulations on food additives. Rasmussen noted that this policy could create a context to “deregulate food standards.”

“We must restore the integrity of the scientific process by protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data,” the order states. Rasmussen warned that this was creating a context to remove experts and replace them with pseudo-scientists.

The Trump administration has cut news access to some American foreign service employees, even as they clamor that the up-to-date information is essential for their work.

“It is critical to our jobs,” one employee anonymously told HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery on Friday.

The employee said they could not access Politico, The New York Times, or Bloomberg, despite having paid subscriptions to all of them, and added that the content is crucial as the news industry covers policy developments, information on meetings, and more. They added that the loss of Politico Pro was particularly damaging, as the digital publication serves as a popular channel to publish leaked documents.

DOGE severed the government’s subscriptions after a MAGA conspiracy emerged that revenue for Politico—which had a lapse in payroll on Tuesday—was dependent on subscriptions paid for through USAID, which was under a budget freeze at the time. In truth, USAID paid roughly $24,000 for its subscriptions to Politico Pro, while the rest of the government spent $8.4 million on the premium news subscription in 2024. But federal subscriptions to Politico Pro began under Trump’s first administration, according to public data from USASpending.

“I was made aware of the funding of USAID to media outlets, including Politico.… And I can confirm that the more than eight million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayer’s dime will no longer be happening,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week. “The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now.”

Politico bosses sent a memo to staff saying they “welcome” the conversation around the value of their products, which provide in-depth policy analysis and hard-hitting government scoops.

The company had “never been the beneficiary of government programs or subsidies,” Politico CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and global editor in chief John Harris wrote in the memo, and the “overwhelming majority” of subscriptions stemmed from the private sector. “Please know that our business is strong and enduring,” they wrote.

But that doesn’t mean that the White House isn’t still benefiting from the news wires.

“My guess,” the anonymous foreign service person told HuffPost, “is the White House kept their access.”

Musk and his team similarly attacked Reuters, misleadingly claiming that DOGE had “uncovered” details that the news organization had been “paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception.’” In actuality, the public contract to Reuters’s data division was authorized by Trump during his first administration and had tasked Reuters to research potential defenses against deception.

Elon Musk and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a very political-looking meeting that they swear was just business—and that Donald Trump barely knew anything about.

Musk and Modi met at Blair House in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to discuss “space, mobility, technology and innovation,” as Modi put it on X.

At the sit-down, Modi was flanked by his entire foreign affairs team. His seven different aides sat facing some of Musk’s children, while Musk and Modi sat in the head chairs that the president and a foreign dignitary usually sit in.

The meeting raised eyebrows everywhere, as Musk has multiple potential business ventures with India, including his Starlink satellite network and is looking for a way around the country’s electric vehicle tariffs. Senator Chris Murphy posited that Musk was basically acting as secretary of state, but “not to ask for concessions that would benefit Americans, but for concessions that would make him rich.”

Trump, however, was clueless when asked about the meeting later that day.

“When Elon Musk met with Prime Minister Modi earlier today, did he do so as an American CEO or did he do so as a representative of the U.S. government?” a reporter asked Trump.

“Uhh, are you talking about me?” Trump replied.

“No, Elon Musk.”

“Well Elon—I don’t know. They met, and I assume he wants to do business in India, but India’s a very hard place to do business in because of the tariffs.… No, I would imagine he met possibly because he’s running a company,” Trump replied.

“How does Modi know if he’s meeting with a CEO or meeting with a representative of your government?” a reporter then asked.

“Well he’s meeting with me in a little while, so I’m gonna ask him that question,” Trump said.

This exchange only fuels the perception of Trump as a simple figurehead while the world’s richest man actually runs the show, kind of how the royals are in England. One can only wonder how far this will go. Does Musk just get access to every single important person who walks through the White House doors?

Steve Bannon, former architect of the MAGA movement turned podcaster, warned that Republicans making cuts to Medicaid would affect members of Donald Trump’s fan club.

On the Thursday episode of War Room, while gushing over massive government spending cuts, Bannon warned that cutting Medicaid specifically would prove unpopular among the working-class members of Trump’s base, who make up some of the 80 million people who get their health care through that program.

“Medicaid, you got to be careful, because a lot of MAGA’s on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are deeeeeead wrong,” Bannon said. “Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.”

Republicans’ nascent budget blueprints this week contained a proposal for the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which oversees Medicaid, to reduce the deficit by at least $880 billion from 2025 to 2034.

The gargantuan cuts would help Republicans pay to extend Trump’s 2017 tax plan, lightening the load for the very rich at the expense of the poor.

The House GOP plan would direct several congressional committees to find at least $1.5 trillion in savings across their programs. Bannon didn’t see that working out, saying that there was “confusion and mayhem” on Capitol Hill.

“Show me the trillion dollars in cuts. I don’t want a $2 trillion deficit. I want to see it cut in half. How’d you do it?” Bannon said. “What they’re talking about, the 1.5 trillion over 10 years, that’s $150 billion a year. Now, I realize this may be taken differently, but it’s $150 billion. It’s not gonna work.

“And to back it up, if you got the C.R. on the 14th. You gotta fund the government going forward, or maybe not, but I don’t see ’em shutting down President Trump’s government in his first 100 days,” Bannon said, referring to the government spending deadline on March 14.

“It’s—how could we possibly have a $2 trillion deficit; where are the DOGE cuts? We need ’em all. They’ve had at least enough time to identify at least the waste fraud abuse in all these different organizations. It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Bannon continued.

“I think it’s generally confusion and mayhem on Capitol Hill. But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s some logic here, and maybe they’re making some progress on this. But until we see the math, and I mean hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts, hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts, and stop whining about entitlements. Get into that discretionary spending. Get into the Pentagon.”