WASHINGTON — Senators from the Energy and Natural Resources committee said Thursday the Donald Trump administration firing so many National Nuclear Security Administration employees, even while reversing most, presents a national security risk.
“President Trump is doing exactly what our adversaries want,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources committee who oversees Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, said Thursday referring to the administration firing much of the work force at the DOE laboratories. “They [the adversaries] aren’t losing their best experts, we are. This is a national security threat that will have lasting impacts on our country for decades to come.”
Heinrich’s comments came at a committee hearing Thursday where witnesses spoke to Senators on the risks posed by foreign nationals from “countries of risk” working at labs for the DOE and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The witnesses included Geraldine Richmond, former undersecretary for science and innovation at the DOE under the Joe Biden administration, and Paul Dabbar, former undersecretary for science at DOE under the first Trump administration.
Late last Thursday Feb 13, over 300 of NNSA’s 1,800 employees were fired, including all probationary employees, through Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. This sweep affected about 100 employees at the Pantex Plant, which oversees the assembly and disassembly of active nuclear weapons and makes up about 30% of the cut.
The firings of all but 28 employees were rescinded around 24 hours later, but many employees could not be contacted or notified of their reinstatement, such as at Pantex’s sister site Y-12 national security complex, which processes and upgrades uranium and lithium for nuclear weapons.
When Heinrich asked Richmond about her thoughts on the current dismissals, she said, “these cuts, particularly in the security area” give her “even greater concern because they’re immediate.”
“To be able to handle classified information,” Richmond continued, “when we make these cuts, even if we say come on back… what are the chances we’ve increased the risk of someone being hired by China to come over and share what they’ve been doing. I too have been recruited,” she added. “I don’t have a mortgage to pay,” but “there are other people that do,” she said.
Heinrich agreed, adding “one of the, probably the leading red flag for someone being a risk with respect to recruitment is financial distress. So we just created a whole bunch of people with really important clearances, really important expertise,” that are “all under financial distress,” creating “a bunch of targets for the CCP.”
“I’m aghast at how unthoughtfully this is all being carried out,” Heinrich said.
After the hearing, Dabbar declined comment on the mass firings, and said that he had “no idea” what would happen with the employees whose firings were rescinded.
“I want answers and that’s why I’m sending a letter,” Cortez Masto, who oversees Nevada National Security Site, told the Exchange Monitor in the halls of the Capitol Thursday. She expressed frustration on how she wants to know “exactly who was fired and what is going on. I only have published reports that there were firings, and now they’re trying to rehire people but they’re having problems doing that.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources committee, said that the NNSA dismissed fewer than 50 employees and that they were mainly in clerical roles, and that the firings “paled in comparison” to how many people the Biden administration hired. “When people are crying that the sky is falling, it usually is not,” Lee said.
However, Rosie Garcia, who was in a non-clerical role as a self-proclaimed “program analyst” for eight months at NNSA, wrote on her LinkedIn that she was let go “like many of my colleagues at National Nuclear Security Administration,” and has not put an update out about any reinstatement.
