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.”

Donald Trump’s recent spate of crackdowns and reshuffling at the Voice of America reveal the administration’s plan to transform the award-winning newsroom into a MAGA propaganda machine.

VOA’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, was placed under investigation last week, for allegedly expressing political bias against the Trump administration in his social media posts, according to The New York Times.

A memo sent to Herman listed a swath of reasons he’d come under scrutiny. One of the reasons cited is Trump’s executive order titled “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations,” which includes the provision that “failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.”

Herman said he has been placed under a paid “excused absence” and expects to lose his job, according to NPR.

This isn’t the first time Herman has been the subject of this kind of investigation: He was the subject of a probe about the same supposed issue during the last year of Trump’s first administration. That time, leadership at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which oversees VOA, had claimed that Herman’s posts relaying criticism of Trump betrayed a political bias. A federal judge found that former USAGM CEO Michael Pack had violated journalists’ First Amendment rights by interfering with VOA.

By comparison, this probe is coming directly from VOA’s acting senior program director, John Featherly, with the approval of VOA’s director, Michael Abramowitz, a Biden-era figure. But again, the probe specifically cites Herman’s engagement with social media posts regarding the second Trump administration’s trove of controversies.

Crucially, Herman himself is not expressing any attitudes, only sharing perspectives critical of the Trump administration—not atypical for a journalist.

At the same time, VOA moved its White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, who has 27 years of experience, to another beat. Journalists at VOA told NPR that no rationale was given for the reshuffling.

That wasn’t the only shakeup at VOA last week.

Former TV anchor turned failed MAGA Senate candidate Kari Lake was made a special adviser at VOA, pending her confirmation to run the agency. Trump’s pick to head USAGM, Brent Bozell III, needs to be confirmed before Lake can formally take the reins from Abramowitz.

Lake has alleged liberal bias at VOA but promised that the agency “won’t become Trump TV.”

In an email announcing her appointment, USAGM’s chief, Roman Napoli, wrote that Lake’s experience “will be invaluable as we continue our mission to clearly and effectively present the policies of the Trump Administration around the world.”

As Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, pointed out in a series of posts on X Monday, “That is NOT the assignment that Congress gave USAGM.” Rather, the mission statement of USAGM, which is codified into U.S. law, is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

Herman’s likely dismissal and Widakuswara’s reassignment are “having a chilling effect on the entire institution,” one VOA staffer said, according to Stelter.

Some staffers believe that the changes are part of management’s efforts to obey in advance of true scrutiny from the Trump administration, Stelter reported. And apparently, it’s been going on for a while. “Four sources told CNN on condition of anonymity that multiple Trump-related stories have been watered down in recent months,” Stelter wrote.

A group of centrist Democrats is being mocked and criticized for their new strategy to defeat Donald Trump and Republicans.

Earlier this month, the centrist think tank Third Way gathered the group, which included Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials, and party leaders, in Loudoun County, Virginia, to come up with a game plan on how to return to relevancy, Politico reports. But the resulting conclusions seemed way off base.

For example, among the 20 solutions suggested for the party were to “embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery”; ban “far-left candidate questionnaires and refuse to participate in forums that create ideological purity tests”; and push “back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging.”

The plan also included a proposal to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate,” which would seem to reject the money of many working-class donors and elevate billionaires and millionaires at a time when the Trump administration is being criticized as a wealthy oligarchy.

When Politico published its report on Sunday, the findings were immediately torn apart on social media.

One commentator pointed out that if Democrats were going to be rejecting small-dollar donors, they would shift toward wealthier campaign contributors coming from corporate sources.

The irony of meeting in Loudoun County, a wealthy Washington, D.C. suburb in northern Virginia, while concluding that candidates should “get out of elite circles and into real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches)” was not lost on at least one critic.

None of the conclusions seem to really get at what has worked for Democrats in the past or reinforce what popular Democrats, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are doing right now. Democrats need to go back to their working-class roots to win back working-class voters, and unsurprisingly, a meeting of party elites in a rich locale isn’t going to yield any solutions on how to do that.

U.S. Agency for International Development acting assistant administrator Nicholas Enrich—who was placed on administrative leave for writing two damning memos regarding the agency’s recent failure to provide lifesaving international aid in the midst of Marco Rubio’s program freeze—was about to publish a third. And it’s even worse than the rest, according to The Bulwark.

In his first memo, Enrich described severe staff reductions, from 783 positions to 69, and in his second, he noted that 72 different USAID activities had no funding, leading to a death toll that is “not known.” But in his third memo, Enrich estimates how many people will die or get deadly diseases as a result of the cuts.

The memo notes that a permanent halt of $7.7 billion in aid could lead to “12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually,” “a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally,” “an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year,” and in a potential worst-case scenario, over “28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases,” according to The Bulwark’s summary.

These programs are much more critical than the Trump administration would have the public believe, as it peddles false conspiracy theories about USAID like the agency providing condoms for Hamas.

Enrich went on to write that potentially 17 million pregnant women would lose access to lifesaving services, more than 11 million newborns would go without postnatal care, and about one million children would not receive treatment for severe acute malnutrition.

“Weakened disease surveillance doesn’t only jeopardize natural outbreak detection—it also creates openings for malicious actors,” he wrote. “Global health monitoring systems serve as the ‘smoke alarm’ for unusual disease patterns that could signal a bioterrorism event. If those alarms are switched off or muted due to lack of funding, a deliberate release of a pathogen could spread for weeks under the guise of a normal outbreak.”

Sources close to Enrich told The Bulwark that he knew publishing the memos would be career suicide. And while this memo is a crucial look into what is actually being lost in these cuts, it’s likely Trump will never lay eyes on it.

Protesters plagued Vice President JD Vance’s vacation over the weekend, calling out the second-highest-ranking executive branch leader for the administration’s catastrophic agenda.

Vance was less than welcome during a family ski trip to Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort on Saturday, as hundreds of protesters gathered to express their outrage at the official and his connection to the Trump administration.

Demonstrators lining the streets in Waitsfield lamented the administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, while others argued that the country “is in serious trouble” under Trump’s leadership.

“Our democracy is at risk, and we have people who don’t care about people,” Terry Bambrick from Richmond, Vermont, told the crowd, reported NBC 5.

A smattering of signage posted online captured the local resentment: “Proud of Mad River Valley, Disgusted by This Administration”; “SHAME”; “Go fuck a couch, not my country”; “Support your local co-op, not this fkn coup”; “bully JD Vance, go away.”

Shops and storefronts in the area also participated in the protest, placing signage out front to inform the vice president that he would receive no service in the Green Mountain State.

“Sorry VP, sold out,” read a sign outside of Mad River Glen in Waitsfield.

“Vance? We thought Elon was VP,” read a sign posted on the sidewalk.

Others turned out to express their horror that the vice president had bombed a potential peace talk between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday, escalating tensions and instigating conflict between the two presidents by claiming that the Ukrainian leader had not been grateful for U.S. aid.

One demonstrator held up a sign that said, “Vance is a traitor” who should “go ski in Russia.”

As Vance departed on Sunday back to Washington, one local, Tommy Lovegood, had a message for the vice president: “This is Vermont. You don’t belong here,” Lovegood told NBC 5.

Elon Musk’s latest futile foray to get federal workers to spill about their week at work has seriously started to annoy members of Donald Trump’s own Cabinet, The Washington Post reported Monday.

Government workers began to receive a wave of emails Friday with the subject “What did you do last week? Part II,” the sequel to Musk’s ineffectual accomplishment email from the week before. Once again, the emails appeared to come from an account linked to human resources at the Office of Personnel Management, and prompted workers to respond by the end of the day Monday “each week,” copying their managers on their responses.

As soon as the emails began to arrive so did instructions from department heads—prompting workers to ignore the email.

At the Department of Energy, one official told staff not to respond to any emails prompting them to list their accomplishments. Employees told the Post that even their Trump-appointed leadership had grown weary of the Department of Government Efficiency’s tedious directives, as the agency was already enacting Trump’s sweeping agenda to boost fossil fuel production in the face of his so-called “national energy emergency.”

In addition to Musk’s emails, agencies have already been dealing with DOGE’s recommendations to implement massive layoffs. Earlier this month, the DOE laid off between 1,200 and 2,000 of its roughly 14,000 employees as part of DOGE’s government-wide purge of federal workers.

One DOE employee told the Post that the emails represented a “power struggle” between DOGE and federal agencies. Another suggested that the emails were designed to unnerve federal workers.

“It does give off ‘psychological warfare’ vibes to send these when they know folks would be heading to bed, or cooking dinner, on weekends in particular,” the employee said.

At the State Department, Undersecretary for Management Tibor P. Nagy sent out an email to employees assuring them that management would “respond on the behalf of our workforce,” according to an email obtained by the Post. At least one ambassador also sent out instructions to ignore Musk’s demand.

Once again, Musk insisted on social media that responding to his “pulse check” email was “mandatory for the executive branch.”

But, in the end, it seems like Musk’s email just isn’t good for efficiency.

One employee at the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if two million federal employees spent 15 minutes responding to emails, at their average wage of $35 per hour, they would ultimately waste 500,000 hours and cost the government $17.5 million.

“That’s a conservative estimate,” the employee told the Post. “There are more than two million feds, and most of us spent way more than 15 minutes between trying to figure out what it meant, meetings about whether to respond or not and actually writing the email.”

The employee also pointed out that many federal employees already write reports on their weekly accomplishments, and that Musk’s redundancy-hunting email was ultimately redundant itself.