Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Are Wreaking Havoc on Nuclear Safety

The Department of Government Efficiency’s wide-ranging and haphazard cuts to the federal government have reached the nation’s nuclear safety programs.

Just before Valentine’s Day, at the direction of Elon Musk, the Trump administration nixed 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce despite the objections of senior officials, The Washington Post reported Monday.

“The president said workers critical to national security would be exempt from the firings. But then there was an active decision to say these positions are not critical to national security,” one unidentified official at the agency told the Post. “It is so absurd I don’t even know what to say.”

Previous reporting had revealed that the staff reductions at the nuclear agency were part of a larger layoff by DOGE directed at the Department of Energy that sought to ax up to 2,000 employees. DOGE pledged that the mass firing only affected noncritical employees who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles,” but that was little more than a bold-faced lie.

One of the staffers forced out of his position included acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the “top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency,” The Bulwark reported last month.

Other critical employees dismissed in the purge included staffers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is responsible for maintaining and minimizing radiation and potential damage from accidents at the nuclear site. The cut workers included an emergency preparedness manager, a radiation protection manager, the security manager, the fire protection engineer, and two facility representatives.

The losses were considered so ill-advised and extreme that the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration reversed course on the hatchet job, welcoming the affected employees back to their jobs. The White House also walked back the decision after it received a “stream of panicked calls” from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who demanded the immediate reinstatement of some 314 nuclear staff workers, including engineers, technicians, and managers, according to the Post.

“These are jobs directly tied to keeping bad things from happening at facilities in places like Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Kansas City, Missouri,” another anonymous official who recently left their job told the newspaper. “A lot of them are in red states. These lawmakers are not thrilled by the potential for bad things happening in their communities.”

But the process wasn’t as simple as an invite back to the office. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the NNSA are considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure of if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

Musk’s rapid-fire cuts at the NNSA serve as another monstrous example that Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” philosophy can’t be easily adopted or translated into a federal bureaucracy providing critical services. The tech billionaire has similarly had to walk back cuts that his juvenile team made to the nation’s disease-prevention programs, as well as Food and Drug Administration teams responsible for reviewing AI-assisted surgery protocols and food safety, among other layoffs.

Further still, DOGE has not lived up to its promises. The organization has had to rescind claims that it saved the government billions of dollars, deleting details from the group’s “wall of receipts” after journalists fact-checked that the programs they slashed never actually tallied up to the bold savings.

Trump issued an ominous message to American farmers as he announced his planned kneecapping of their most profitable market: foreign exports.

“To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!”

This will have a massive, direct impact on how much money farmers—many of whom are still reeling from the tariffs (and subsequent bailout) from Trump’s first term—will make from the products they grow. Agricultural exports like soybeans, grains, fruit, vegetables, and livestock products provided U.S. farmers with about $180 billion in annual revenue in the 2023 fiscal year.

It’s unlikely that the farmers will see the “fun” in having to radically readjust their processes for less revenue. This coincides with Trump’s tariff war, as he plans to levy massive 25 percent tariffs on imported goods from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent on goods from China. Chinese state media over the weekend reported that China planned to retaliate with tariffs on U.S. agriculture—perhaps leading Trump to decide to destroy American farmers himself.

Donald Trump is celebrating his administration’s move to ignore a law that targeted money laundering.

On Sunday, the Treasury Department announced that it would stop enforcing “any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either.”

In effect, the government will no longer require shell companies to disclose their owners and beneficiaries, allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to hide their profits from the public. The rule was part of the Corporate Transparency Act, or CTA, passed in 2021, which required some businesses to report information on people who own or control a company, indirectly or directly, to the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Trump quickly took to Truth Social after the Treasury announcement, posting, “Exciting News!”

“This Biden rule has been an absolute disaster for Small Businesses Nationwide,” Trump’s post read. “Furthermore, the Treasury is now finalizing an Emergency Regulation to formally suspend this rule for American businesses. The economic menace of [Beneficial Ownership Information] reporting will soon be no more.”

Republicans have long opposed the CTA, claiming that the requirements are too steep for small businesses and companies to fulfill. The rule on beneficial ownership was supposed to go into effect in January, but a federal court order froze enforcement of the rule. The CTA was passed by the Biden administration to tackle tax evasion and corporate cronyism, which, unsurprisingly, is at odds with the Trump administration.

Since his inauguration, Trump has gone after financial regulation as well as government agencies that seek to curb corporate power, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Earlier this month, the president also issued an executive order freezing enforcement of the 48-year-old Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits any person or company tied to the United States from paying money or offering gifts to foreign officials to help their business.

It seems that Trump wants his friends in the corporate world, as well as his own businesses, to be able to rake in profits with much less restrictions, and if they so choose, hide them from the public. It will now be easier for a business with unpopular practices, or a president with shady business interests, to avoid scrutiny.

The Democratic National Committee has decided to double down on the same losing strategies that lost it the last election.

Newly elected DNC Chair Ken Martin on Monday named Roger Lau as executive director of the committee. Lau has been serving as the DNC’s deputy executive director since 2021, joining the committee after running Elizabeth Warren’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign.

Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky noted that Lau’s appointment was a sign that the party is “taking a stay-the-course approach to staffing despite the party’s losses in November.… Their selections reflect the DNC’s post-election preference for experienced operatives over shaking up the party apparatus on South Capitol Street.”

Former DNC chief of staff Libby Schneider will become deputy executive director, after previously serving as a senior adviser and national rural political director. Jessica Wright, who worked most recently as Biden’s State Department chief of staff for operations, will also join the DNC as deputy executive director as well as the new chief of staff to the chair. Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty, Washington State Democrats Chair Shasti Conrad, and union chief Stuart Appelbaum will be associate chairs.

The party faces a crossroads between business-as-usual moderate liberalism and a more aggressive attempt at large, progressive policy. It seems clear that it’s chosen the former, as centrists gather behind closed doors to blame identity politics for their loss and the party picks Senator Elissa Slotkin to respond to Trump’s joint congressional address on Tuesday. Only time will tell how far this 2016-esque approach to politics will get the party. Right now, it’s mostly just resulted in political failure.

Unable to acknowledge that Americans might actually be upset with his agenda, Donald Trump has cooked up a bizarre theory to explain the mass protests taking place in Republican lawmakers’ town halls across the country. But the rationale behind the idea sounds awfully familiar to his presidential election conspiracy.

“Paid ‘troublemakers’ are attending Republican Town Hall Meetings,” Trump posted on Truth Social Monday morning. “It is all part of the game for the Democrats, but just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION, it’s not going to work for them!”

Republican lawmakers were met with fire and fury over the weekend as their constituents hounded them for failing to intervene in a budget resolution that will result in billions in cuts to Medicaid, as well as refusing to speak out against Elon Musk’s unchecked dissolution of federal agencies and, with it, thousands of federal jobs and popular social programs.

On Saturday, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall ended his town hall early, walking out to a cacophony of boos after a couple of attendees brought up concerns over DOGE’s decision to fire some 6,000 veterans.

In Tennessee, a crowd before Representative Diana Harshbarger screamed “No!” when the Republican lawmaker asked if there had been a “mandate to the president from the American people,” who she claimed “overwhelmingly” voted Trump in.

“The Congressional Budget Office—do you know what it’s going to be by 2035?” Harshbarger asked the crowd, referring to the federal deficit. “It’s going to be $59 trillion.”

“We’re giving the billionaires tax cuts!” shouted a man in response.

The seismic cuts to the federal government—which include a $880 billion slash to Medicare—are a trade-off for conservatives who were tasked by Trump to extend his 2017 tax plan, which will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

In Texas, more than 100 attendees at Representative Keith Self’s town hall in deep-red Collins County shouted at the Republican for so long that it was difficult for Self to get a word in. At one point, the crowd stood up and chanted and clapped to “vote him out!”

The venomous protests are a warning sign for the Trump administration that public patience is already wearing thin for his aggressive agenda. Last month, Missouri Representative Mark Alford was practically shut down at his own town hall after he expressed support for Musk’s massive layoff plan. At one point, while suggesting to the crowd that they could vote for someone else in the next election if they didn’t approve of Musk’s appointment, one person shouted back, “We didn’t elect Elon!”

Alford seemed to take a page out of Trump’s own playbook in the immediate aftermath, refusing to chalk up the local frustration to his own inaction. In an interview with CNN, Alford referred to his own constituents as “outside agitators.”