The federal workforce of the National Nuclear Security Administration has shrunk by 236 employees, or 11.9 percent, from its peak of 1,991 early in fiscal 2025, the Government Accountability Office reported, after the agency halted workforce planning and limited hiring in response to presidential directives in fiscal 2025 while separations rose significantly.
The timing cuts against the workload. NNSA oversees a 25 billion dollar annual budget and about 70,000 contractor personnel maintaining the US nuclear stockpile, and GAO describes its current workload as the largest since the Cold War, centred on a 200 billion dollar, two decade effort to modernise nuclear weapons and infrastructure. In 2024 the agency had committed to rebuilding its federal workforce after GAO found persistent recruiting and retention problems; that build peaked and then reversed within a year.
GAO attributes the reduction to two causes: very limited hiring from the second quarter of fiscal 2025 through the first quarter of fiscal 2026, and separations driven mainly by employees choosing to retire or resign. The losses reached mission critical occupations, including nuclear engineers and the contract specialists who oversee the contractor workforce that does most of the agency’s work.
The report is a capacity warning rather than a budget fight. The federal staff being cut are the government’s own engineers and contracting officers, the layer that directs and audits the 70,000 contractor personnel, at the moment the modernisation programme’s delivery schedule is at its most demanding.