DOGE cuts have gotten rid of hundreds of those people.
Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency has been slashing through the federal workforce without much thought for the consequences.
According to theTimes, the number is much higher and the losses far greater.
Nuclear weapon Add topic 1 ⁄ 30 More details An assortment of American nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Clockwise from top left: PGM-17 Thor, LGM-25C Titan II, HGM-25A Titan I, Thor-Agena, LGM-30G Minuteman III, LGM-118 Peacekeeper, LGM-30A/B/F Minuteman I or II, PGM-19 Jupiter.© U.S. Air Force photo.
The DOGE cuts did not begin with layoffs but with buyout offers.
Working on nukes requires a specialized set of skills.
Itll be significantly harder now.
Among the lost is Kyle Fowler, the director of the NNSAs Office of Strategic Materials Production Modernization.
Fowlers office was part of an office that worked on enriching uranium.
Three countries with which the U.S. hasnt been on great terms.
Also gone is Lina Cordero who worked on modernizing plutonium pit production.
Manufacturing them is a bit of a lost art.
But Los Alamos only produced a few pits between 2007 and 2011 and then stopped.
The U.S. hasnt manufactured pits at scale since 1989.
Why did we stop?
The Rocky Flats plant outside of Denver Colorado made most of the cores.
It was a nightmare of nuclear waste so horrifying that theFBI raided the placein 1989 andshut it down.
Rocky Flats is so poisonous that the EPA has deemed it a Superfund site.
After the raid, the FBI discovered 62 pounds of plutonium in ventilation systems.
Radiation levels in some areas of the plant were so high that Geiger counters could not register it.
Rates of cancer and infant mortality in the surrounding community were enormous.
They need to know itll be different this time, that another Rocky Flats wont happen.
Thanks to DOGE, many of the people who could help answer that question are gone.
The bulk of the DOEs nuclear work is done by around 60,000 contract workers.
The DOE told theTimesthat those workers have been exempt from cuts.
And that may be true, but a lot of the people who oversee those workers are gone.
Youll be shocked to hear that American defense contractors arent always on their best behavior.
They dont always have their workers best interest at heart nor are they great at saving taxpayer money.
The Sentinel nuclear weapons program that will see the country dig 450 new silos is81% over budget.
Theres no guarantee costs wont climb.
Northrop Grumman is building the missile and employs thousands of contractors to get it done.
The contractor willavoid criminal prosecutionfor the deaths.
Donald Trump has said hewants to denuclearizebut the nuclear weapons industrial complex has a habit of grinding forward.
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