By Kennedy Maize
The Department of Energy’s long standing cleanup of its legacy nuclear weapons program is short staffed…and it shows. That’s a finding from the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency.
According to a GAO report last month (May 19), DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which is responsible for cleaning up the agency’s atomic waste going back to World War II, saw its total staff decrease by a third from fiscal year (FY) 2023 through FY 2025. “This created an overall vacancy rate of 45 percent as of the end of FY 2025, based on a staffing need of 1,515 full-time employees that EM identified in FY 2023,” said GAO.
The staff shortage predates the predatory Trump administration, which has made a bad situation worse. According to GAO, the office “has become further understaffed since GAO reported on EM’s workforce challenges in July 2024.”
Understaffing exists, according to the report, in “mission-critical occupations that are integral to carrying out EM’s mission, which includes addressing contaminated buildings, soil, and groundwater, and treating radioactive waste.” GAO found, “Of all EM vacancies, 51 percent were in occupations that EM designated as mission-critical as of the end of fiscal year 2025.” Fiscal year 2023 mission-critical vacancies totaled 160, or 20%. For the end of FY 2025, those vacancies hit 348, or 44%.”
Overall the mission-critical head count fell from 625 at the end of FY2023 to 442 at the end of FY 2025. Among the critical positions, EM headquarters officials identified 59 they considered as “especially key to safety” as vacant. Those vacancies, EM told the GAO analysts, means “there are fewer people to manage the workload, resulting in employees potentially burning out with heavy workloads, which gives them concern over the safety of operations. EM staff and federal oversight are being stretched thin….”
What accounts for the upsurge in worker shortages in key agency areas? The finger points directed at the current White House, which ran for election in 2024 on campaign assertions that the federal government across the board was filled with slackers and goldbrickers. Trump initially, illegally, and irrationally empowered Elon Musk to take a scythe to the federal workforce with the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was not a department, had no legal status, and created enormous inefficiencies.
Musk’s personnel pirates caused chaos across the government, including DOE, which immediately imposed a hiring freeze in nearly every DOE program office. Contract officers all across the federal government were soon besieged by DOGE apparatchiks seeking to terminate work they unilaterally found “wasteful.” Entry-level employees with probationary, usually one year, employment were fired en masse.
DOGE’s depredations across the government created a public and political uproar that even the president couldn’t ignore. In late January 2025 the White House Office of Management and Budget replaced Musk with a government-wide program administered by the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM), called the “Deferred Resignation Program.”
This program let federal employees go home and get paid for working the next eight months, with their resignations effective September 30, 2025. For employees eligible to retire, they could also walk for full pay and start receiving retirement benefits on September 30.
According to GAO, the effect of the administration’s fix of its DOGE dilemma harmed DOE’s cleanup activities. Of the 409 EM employees who left the agency office during 2025, 409 were under the deferred resignation program — 88 who chose to quit on Sept.30 (two died before the fateful date) and 224 who elected to retire effective Sept. 30 while ceasing to come to work in the meantime.
For FY 2023, when the Trump program was not in effect, the EM program saw conventional attrition of 82 employees. If the goal of the deferred resignation program was to reduce overall federal employment, regardless of program impact, it worked, according to another GAO report: “In the first half of 2025, staffing declined at nearly all major agencies. About 134,000 employees separated during this time and about 66,000 were hired. Another 144,000 employees were approved for a deferred resignation program that required they leave federal employment by the end of 2025.”
While the Trump-induced attrition rate was artificially, and deliberately, high, GAO says it likely will remain higher than in previous normal years, in part because the work force is aging. According to the watchdog agency, “EM’s attrition rate from regular separations may increase in the future because 35 percent (299 staff) of the 856 staff on board at the end of FY 2025 will be eligible to retire by the end of FY 2030.”
In general, federal civil servants are eligible for retirement benefits at age 62 with five years of service, at 60 with 20 years, at 55 with 30 years in. There are other conditions for special circumstances including reductions in force, disability, and special jobs such as air traffic controllers, police, firefighters, and nuclear materials couriers.
