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by aerostable_slug 490 days ago
Much of that concern comes from a place of ignorance. Example: all the fretting about NNSA.

Having worked with that agency, they have a fair number of people who don't directly have much to do with the nuclear weapons enterprise at all. Those include their social media team, recruiters who try to push going into the weapons community, and the like. There are also the normal administrative paper-pushers that flourish in Federal and state agencies.

Getting rid of some of those people seems like a bad idea when NNSA is a black box that says "scary nukes here", but really isn't once you look inside a little bit. The job of recruiting people should be left to the companies that run the Labs. We don't need a social media team to publicize a statutorily-required agency. We could probably prune a bunch of admins and have little impact on the enterprise after a little bit of shakeup. Etc.

1 comments

Why are you downplaying it? Musk and Trump wrecklessly terminated employees responsible for the maintenance and inspection of nuclear weapons. This isn't just a social media team.

The loss of institutional knowledge for managing an arsenal of nuclear weapons has serious consequences for security.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-...

> Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.

> It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to he nation’s national security.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-...

> Just days before, officials in leadership had scrambled to write descriptions for the roughly 300 probationary employees at the agency who had joined the federal workforce less than two years ago.

> Managers were given just 200 characters to explain why the jobs these workers did mattered.