Key weapons complex Dems slam DOGE after NNSA contractors targeted

Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) criticized the Department of Government Efficiency last week, around the time DOGE began reviewing contractors to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s franchise.

According to publication Semafor, which broke the story last week, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created by President Donald Trump and led by Trump campaign donor Elon Musk, asked the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to justify contractor roles and why they should be kept in one-sentence summaries. 

According to Semafor, the DOGE employees at NNSA have to categorize 1,400 support service contract employees as either to keep, to delete, or more information needed.

“Trump asked people if they felt passionately about waste and fraud and efficiency within government, and everyone gets behind that, and then they don’t notice that that’s not what they’re actually trying to fix with what they’re doing when they’re reviewing contracts and they’re firing people,” Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Exchange Monitor last week. “Like I said, they’re looking for who’s easiest to fire, and second, who is least loyal to the Trump agenda.”

Stansbury, ranking member of the new DOGE subcommittee in the House Committee on oversight and Government Reform, also said on the House floor last week that the only reason Trump and the GOP were voting for a continuing resolution to keep the government open until the end of the fiscal year was “so that they can get on with their ‘real agenda.’”

“And you all know what the real agenda is,” Stansbury, whose district abuts Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, said. “The real agenda is that they’re dismantling the federal government. They’re firing tens of thousands of federal workers… they are illegally impounding funds.”

In February, NNSA was thrown through a loop when DOGE employees fired, then rehired, around one-sixth of its workforce.

The New York Times also published a story Monday on the DOGE review of the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous agency in charge of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.