US agency scrambles to rehire nuclear safety staff it fired on Trump's order

The US federal agency tasked with overseeing the country’s nuclear weapons is scrambling to bring back the employees it fired on Thursday as part of US President Donald Trump’s federal cost-cutting measures. According to NBC News, the National Nuclear Security Administration sent out a letter to its team stating that the agency’s employees “are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

The workers were among the hundreds of employees in the energy department who received termination letters, earlier this week as the Trump administration continues with its crackdown on federal agency workers. Last week, around 10,000 federal workers were sacked from their roles, adding to the estimated 75,000 workers who have accepted an offer from the White House to leave voluntarily in the autumn.

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The officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the US’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built. As per the report, while the NNSA was struggling to find these employees, they sent out an email to their current personnel. “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s contact emails,” the agency said in the mail.

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It is important to note that the NNSA is part of the Department of Energy and oversees the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which is responsible for the safety and reliability of nuclear warheads; the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; the Pantex plant in Texas; the Y-12 national security complex in Tennessee, a source of enriched uranium nuclear weapon components; and other sites.

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The agency operates with an annual budget of $25 billion and is now overseeing a weapon modernization program. According to NBC News, the federal body currently employs more than 65,000 federal and contract employees nationwide. Last year, former US President Joe Biden’s administration approved a US nuclear strategy to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea. Two years earlier, the same administration amended the longstanding “no first use” policy.

However, things changed when Trump came to power. Last week, Trump said that he wants all countries to move toward denuclearization once “we straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine.

“There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said on Thursday at the White House. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”

“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive,” he added. The POTUS also signalled his interest in denuclearization talks with Russia and China at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month.

“Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today because you don’t want to hear it,” Trump averred. As of now, over 60 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration since the Republican leader came back to power on 20 January.