The Trump Administration Reduced the Federal Workforce Overseeing Nuclear Waste Cleanup by a Third in 2025 Through Buyouts and a Hiring Freeze

Details

On May 19, 2026, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management (EM)—the federal office that oversees the cleanup of radioactive and chemical contamination left by decades of nuclear weapons production—lost a third of its federal workforce in a single year. Total federal staff fell from 1,272 at the end of fiscal year 2023 to 856 at the end of FY 2025, a 33 percent decrease that raised the office's overall vacancy rate to 45 percent, based on the 1,515 full-time positions EM had identified in 2023 as necessary to carry out its mission.

The reductions came after the Trump administration, beginning in January 2025, moved to shrink the federal workforce through a hiring freeze, the Deferred Resignation Program, and initiatives associated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). GAO found that of the 409 EM staff who left in FY 2025, 76 percent (312) departed through the Deferred Resignation Program, and nearly half of all departures were in occupations the office considers mission-critical. The vacancies are heaviest in the technical positions that oversee safety at the cleanup sites: 55 percent of nuclear engineering positions and 51 percent of general engineering positions were vacant at the end of the fiscal year.

Background

EM is responsible for cleaning up the environmental legacy of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, a mission spread across 15 active cleanup sites plus a headquarters near Washington, D.C., and a business center in Cincinnati. Its work includes deactivating and demolishing contaminated buildings, remediating contaminated soil and groundwater, and treating tens of millions of gallons of radioactive liquid waste. A relatively small federal staff oversees roughly tens of thousands of contractors who perform the physical cleanup. The total effort is estimated to cost more than half a trillion dollars, and DOE's environmental liabilities and project management appear on GAO's "High Risk List." In FY 2025, the DOE Office of Inspector General also reported material weaknesses in how EM estimates those liabilities.

GAO first flagged EM's staffing problems in a July 2024 report, when the office had 263 vacancies and a 17 percent vacancy rate. That report concluded that understaffing and weak workforce planning had already contributed to schedule delays, cost overruns, and workplace accidents, and it made 10 recommendations, including that EM develop a forward-looking workforce plan and a strategy for a multigenerational pipeline. DOE agreed with all 10, but GAO reported that as of March 2026 the recommendations remained open, with EM officials awaiting a path forward given the change in administrations.

EM's losses were driven by a set of executive-branch actions that began on the administration's first day. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum freezing federal civilian hiring, barring agencies from filling vacant positions or creating new ones outside limited categories such as national security and public safety. On January 28, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) opened the government-wide Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed employees to stop working while keeping full pay and benefits until a separation date no later than September 30, 2025; Energy Secretary Chris Wright instituted a department-specific version at DOE that spring. On February 11, Executive Order 14210 directed agencies to carry out the "workforce optimization initiative" of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), set a target of roughly one hire for every four departures, and required that most remaining hires be approved by a DOGE team member. The hiring freeze was extended several times and then continued under Executive Order 14356 in October 2025. Across the government, GAO found that about 134,000 employees separated in the first half of 2025 and roughly 144,000 more were approved for deferred resignation.

The Scale of the Losses

EM's staffing level at the start of FY 2026—856 employees—was lower than in any year between 2014 and 2024, a period in which its active workforce fluctuated between roughly 1,280 and 1,540. The office's attrition rate for FY 2025 was 38 percent, compared with 10.6 percent in FY 2023 and an 8.1 percent average for both DOE and the federal government as a whole from FY 2013 through FY 2022.

The Deferred Resignation Program accounted for most of the exits. Of the 312 EM employees who separated under the program, 224 did so through retirement and 86 through resignation, according to GAO. Almost half of the 409 total departures—180 employees—were in EM's six headquarters-designated mission-critical occupations, which span engineering, contracting, physical sciences, and information technology management.

The vacancies are unevenly distributed across occupations. GAO reported the following for EM's mission-critical series at the end of FY 2025:

The losses were also uneven across sites. The Hanford Site in Washington State—EM's largest and most expensive cleanup site, and the location once used to produce most of the plutonium for U.S. nuclear weapons—saw the greatest number of departures, with 96 staff leaving and a 46 percent vacancy rate at year's end. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina had a 50 percent attrition rate and a 54 percent vacancy rate. EM's Los Alamos office, in New Mexico, reached a 62 percent vacancy rate after losing more than half its staff. Nathan Anderson, GAO's director for natural resources and environment, said Hanford was among the sites hardest hit and that it is difficult to find people with the knowledge and experience to replace those who left.

At the field level, the losses at Hanford began before the fiscal year closed. In February 2025, DOE fired more than a dozen probationary employees at the site and about 30 more accepted deferred resignations, a reduction the site manager described at the time as roughly 16 percent of Hanford's federal workforce. Senator Patty Murray of Washington said the departures included safety engineers and environmental scientists, and warned that running Hanford "with a skeleton crew is a recipe for disaster."

Mission-Critical and Safety Positions

EM headquarters officials told GAO in December 2025 that 59 positions they considered especially key to safety were vacant. According to those officials, leaving the positions empty means fewer people to manage the workload, raising the risk of burnout and giving them concern over the safety of operations. As of December 2025, GAO reported, no work stoppage had resulted from the vacancies; EM had brought in general support-service and technical-assistance contractors and shifted some tasks to site contractors to keep operations going. Officials also said EM was not hiring entry-level staff and was losing institutional knowledge quickly as employees retired and resigned.

Two positions drew particular attention. Facility representatives serve as EM's on-site presence for safety and compliance, observing and reporting on operations, emergency readiness, and worker health and safety. The combined series that includes facility representatives had a 44 percent vacancy rate, or 230 vacancies, as of December 2025. The role can require 18 months or more of training before an employee is fully qualified, and GAO documented acute shortages: all four facility-representative positions at the Carlsbad Field Office—which manages the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the nation's only deep geologic repository for transuranic waste—were vacant, as was the office's federal project director post. Three of four such positions were vacant at Los Alamos, which also had three vacant director positions. Oak Ridge had 13 facility representatives but, according to a DOE staffing analysis, needed 30 to 36 to meet mission requirements.

The other position, federal project director, is responsible for executing projects costing millions of dollars, including managing safety, cost, scope, and schedule. Because the role is specific to DOE, outside hires rarely have the necessary experience. GAO reported that fully qualifying a federal project director to oversee certain capital projects at Hanford can take up to 10 years, and that officials there consider an employee with two to five years of tenure a "new hire." EM had at least four such vacancies as of December 2025.

An Aging Workforce

The staff that remain skew toward retirement. GAO reported that 35 percent of EM's 856 employees—299 people—will be eligible to retire by the end of FY 2030, and that 30 percent of mission-critical staff will reach eligibility in the same period. Retirement-eligibility rates run above 40 percent at the Carlsbad Field Office, EM headquarters, and the Oak Ridge Reservation Site. With entry-level hiring frozen and the pipeline for specialized roles measured in years, GAO warned that regular attrition could compound the deferred-resignation losses in the years ahead.

The Executive Branch's Role and Rationale

At the department level, the reductions were carried out under Energy Secretary Chris Wright and with the involvement of DOGE, whose staff entered DOE headquarters in early 2025. Wright has defended the reductions as bringing staffing in line with the department's budget, telling a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee in June 2025 that DOE's headcount had grown more than 20 percent under the previous administration and that the reductions were achieved "almost entirely through voluntary measures." At that hearing, Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey—the full committee's ranking member, who requested the GAO report on EM—said DOGE had forced out more than 3,500 DOE employees and stripped the department of critical expertise. In November 2025, Wright also reorganized DOE, consolidating several offices in a shift toward fossil fuels, nuclear power, and critical minerals; EM's cleanup structure remained largely intact.

DOE has framed the 2025 reductions as part of a broader drive for efficiency, and it has emphasized that most departures were voluntary. Government-wide, Scott Kupor, the director of OPM, wrote in December 2025 that more than 92 percent of employees who left in the previous year did so voluntarily, mainly through the Deferred Resignation Program, and argued that "mass firing" headlines did not tell the full story. Roughly 144,000 to 154,000 federal employees across the government accepted deferred resignations in 2025.

For EM specifically, officials told GAO they are reassessing the office's staffing needs and considering efficiencies through reorganization. Based on its FY 2026 budget, EM developed a proposed staffing level of 950 full-time positions—higher than the 856 it began the year with, but well below the 1,515 it identified as needed in 2023. OPM approved a request in early 2026 to hire about 174 staff, drawn from external candidates and internal transfers from other DOE offices, to offset current and near-term gaps. GAO noted that if EM formally lowers its identified staffing need, some currently counted vacancies would be eliminated on paper and the reported vacancy rate would fall. EM officials also said DOE did not plan to reduce the office's work scope to match the smaller workforce. In a related move, DOE in March 2026 reorganized about 90 contract specialists out of EM and into the department's Office of Management, though EM continues to fund those positions.

The administration has separately argued that the cleanup can be accelerated even with fewer federal staff. At Hanford, DOE is pursuing a dual approach that would supplement vitrification—turning waste into glass—with grouting some low-activity waste into a concrete-like form for disposal, which the department says could shave decades and billions of dollars off the timeline. A DOE field office statement described the effort as delivering "better value for taxpayers" while maintaining protection of workers, the public, and the environment. At the Savannah River Site, EM in mid-2026 launched a pilot shifting maintenance planning "from a one-size-fits-all nuclear standard to a graded, risk-based approach." The view that the cleanup program is oversized is not new: Project 2025, a policy blueprint associated with the administration, characterized Hanford as "a particular challenge" and argued that some states and contractors treat the site as a jobs program with little interest in accelerating cleanup.

Reaction and Concerns

Beyond individual lawmakers, workforce analysts and nuclear-safety specialists have warned that the speed and scale of the 2025 reductions outran any plan to preserve capacity. Max Stier, president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, pointed to what he called "dangerous gaps" opening in key federal services. When DOGE-driven terminations swept parts of DOE in February 2025—including an abrupt, later-reversed round of firings at the National Nuclear Security Administration—Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said the cost-cutters were "coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for." Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists cautioned that the firings could create instability across the nuclear program.

The concerns extend to independent oversight. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the only federal body providing independent safety oversight of DOE's defense nuclear sites, fell to two members in January 2025 and faced the prospect of losing the quorum it needs to issue recommendations or hold hearings—a separate but parallel strain on the safety architecture surrounding the weapons complex.

GAO, for its part, reiterated that the recommendations from its 2024 report remain valid, concluding again that without efforts to address the workforce challenges, severe staffing shortages threaten EM's ability to meet its mission. That 2024 assessment had documented that earlier staffing shortfalls contributed to missed safety inspections, cost overruns, schedule delays, and accidents including fires and radiation leaks. As of GAO's 2026 review, no work stoppage or accident had been publicly tied to the 2025 reductions; EM officials said they had leaned on contractors and shared staff across sites to keep operations going, while also telling auditors that federal oversight was being stretched thin. Whether the reductions settle into a smaller but workable office or a lasting loss of oversight capacity is likely to turn on EM's planned hiring, the coming wave of retirements, and whether the specialized safety roles that take years to train can be rebuilt.