WASHINGTON — Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), whose district abuts Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said Tuesday the nuclear enterprise was facing a “workforce shortage.”
Fleischmann, who chairs a House Appropriations subcommittee on Energy & Water, also told the Exchange Monitor Tuesday recent layoffs at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee were reversed quickly enough to avoid impact to operations at the Department of Energy facility.
“What do we face? A workforce shortage,” Fleischmann said in his remarks at a panel on Capitol Hill hosted by a congressional nuclear security working group, Fleischmann and Rep. Bill Foster’s (D-Ill.) and the Washington forum Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance. “We had all of these people from the Cold War, basically, who had an expertise in how to design and manufacture nuclear weapons.”
Fleischmann added, “how do you keep that great expertise going? So we need to rebuild that workforce.”
Workforce concerns, especially recruiting new, younger talent to replace scores of retirement-eligible employees across the weapons complex, has been a big issue for DOE in recent years.
This year, however, Fleischmann’s comments follow President Donald Trump’s recent attempt to fire one-sixth of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) through the Department of Government Efficiency. Acting NNSA director Teresa Robbins issued a memo rescinding the firing of all but 28 employees “effective immediately,” according to the memo obtained by the Monitor.
When asked by the Monitor in the halls of the Capitol whether the “workforce shortage” applied to Oak Ridge or Y-12, Fleischmann said the mass firings “fortunately did not, in any way” because “they rescinded that so quickly, so it was really like an interruption” with “virtually no impact to our reservation.”
Fleischmann added that any DOE employees who did lose their position, “the way it was explained to me was that it was extremely, extremely minimal.”
