GAO says the agency that maintains the nuclear stockpile used its carve-outs and still shrank by nearly 12 percent.
An Exception, Sparingly Applied
The hiring freeze that began on January 20, 2025 carved out national security positions. If any federal agency qualified, it was the one that maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile.
The National Nuclear Security Administration used the carve-out. According to GAO-27-109127, NNSA hired 35 federal employees while the freeze ran, from the second quarter of fiscal 2025 through the first quarter of fiscal 2026.
Over those same four quarters, 256 federal employees left. That is about seven departures for every hire.
Inference, mine and not GAO’s: Executive Order 14210, as GAO describes it, told agencies to hire no more than one employee for every four who depart. Applied to 256 departures, that would have allowed up to 64 hires. NNSA’s 35 sits below even that ceiling. The report does not establish whether the ratio governed NNSA’s exempt hiring.
An exception that produces 35 hires against 256 departures is a courtesy, not a protection.
The Program That Wasn’t Meant for Them
The government-wide deferred resignation program let employees leave on paid administrative leave until a separation date. As GAO’s footnote describes it, the program excluded positions related to immigration enforcement, public safety, and national security, along with any positions an agency chose to exclude.
NNSA did not run its own version and did not join the Energy Department’s. Every participant came through the government-wide offer.
GAO counts 112 NNSA employees who took it. Eighty-four retired and 28 resigned. They account for about 44 percent of the 256 departures in the period, by my arithmetic from GAO’s figures.
The report does not say how NNSA positions were classified for eligibility. NNSA officials confirmed that several applications were deemed ineligible, so someone was drawing lines somewhere. The report doesn’t say where those lines fell.
The timing is also muddy. NNSA officials told GAO that separations jumped in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 partly because some participants had been on administrative leave until then. In other words, some of the staff stopped working well before they left the rolls.
That question belongs to NNSA and OPM, not to GAO.
Nobody Was Laid Off. Everybody Left Anyway.
Here is the defensible version of events. GAO’s separation table shows zero reductions in force at NNSA. Of 669 separations since fiscal 2023, 45 were involuntary.
The agency did not fire its way down to 1,755 federal employees. It got there through retirements, resignations, and a hiring pipeline that went nearly dry.
Hiring peaked at 95 in the third quarter of fiscal 2024. By the third quarter of fiscal 2025 it was two.
Then the arithmetic arrived. NNSA went from a peak of 1,991 employees to 1,755, a drop of 236, or 11.9 percent. GAO says that more than erased the 129 net employees added in the preceding years.
The loss was not spread evenly. Employees in mission-critical occupations fell from 983 to 849, a 13.6 percent decline, which is faster than the workforce as a whole. Engineering and architecture positions lost 63 people since fiscal 2023.
By GAO’s count, which excludes Savannah River staff, the agency now sits below the 1,890-employee cap Congress imposed for years and repealed in fiscal 2023. Congress lifted the ceiling so NNSA could grow. It shrank under the old ceiling instead.
Meanwhile, the salaries and expenses appropriation rose from $475 million to $525 million.
Fairness requires one caution. The strain predates 2025. GAO reported in 2024 that NNSA’s attrition ran higher than the federal government’s from fiscal 2013 to 2022, and the same report found the workforce short of what NNSA’s own studies said it needed.
One of those studies put the optimal federal staffing level at 2,369 full-time equivalents by fiscal 2026, according to GAO’s 2024 report. Full-time equivalents and headcount are not the same measure, so the comparison is rough. Even so, the distance is large.
Who Checks the Locks
The agency oversees about 70,000 management and operating contractor personnel and a $25 billion annual budget. It is also carrying what GAO calls its heaviest workload since the Cold War, a $200 billion modernization effort.
Officials told GAO that staff reductions forced them to scale back some federal oversight, including of nuclear materials security. At one field office, the security staff that provides that oversight lost approximately 40 percent of its people. GAO does not name the office.
The pattern shows up in the office-level data. Environment, Safety, and Health lost 24 percent of its staff, falling from 79 to 60. Management and Budget lost nearly 22 percent. The Nevada, Los Alamos, and Y-12 field offices lost about 21, 18, and 15 percent, and GAO says each of those locations hired fewer than 10 people.
NNSA’s answer, per its officials, is efficiency through technology and artificial intelligence. They also told GAO that AI’s use is limited by staff expertise and by restrictions on using it in classified settings. The same officials acknowledged lost institutional knowledge and heavier workloads for those who stayed.
There is also this. NNSA officials told GAO they halted workforce planning in response to presidential directives in early 2025. GAO’s 2004 review of an earlier NNSA downsizing warned that the agency cut its workforce before determining the critical skills it needed. The warning is twenty-two years old and still reads as current.
What remains unknown: how NNSA positions were classified for the resignation program, which field office lost 40 percent of its security oversight staff, and whether the planning NNSA halted has resumed. GAO says a separate review of NNSA’s long-term workforce planning is due in early 2027.
