Federal workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons are being rehired after being accidentally fired in President Donald Trump’s rush to slash government waste in a whirlwind of new policies since he returned to the White House.
Scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu and officials responsible for supplying electricity are also being given their jobs back after being among the tens of thousands of workers axed by Trump’s administration.
“This shows a level of absolute incompetence in the firing process,” said Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
“They are taking a chainsaw to public services without any kind of careful review of the people being removed and the tasks they are employed for.”
Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary, stressed that Trump is moving swiftly to cut wasteful spending and non-critical government jobs.
“Any key positions that were eliminated are being identified and reinstated rapidly as agencies are streamlined to better serve the American people,” she said.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk and his young aides at the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are in the midst of a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy at the behest of Trump, who views the government as bloated and corrupt.
They have adopted a blunt force approach toward the wholesale firing of workers, often focusing on categories of workers who are easier to fire, like probationary employees, rather than looking at individuals and the specific jobs they do.
That approach has led to a host of mistakes.
After nearly 180 workers were fired last week at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an agency that manages the US nuclear arsenal and secures dangerous radioactive materials around the world, all but 28 of those layoffs were later rescinded.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, whose department oversees the NNSA, said: “When we made mistakes on layoffs at NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours.
“But the security of our country, our nuclear deterrence, our nuclear weapons, is critical, and we ... don’t take that lightly,” he insisted.
The rescinding of the layoffs at NNSA came after managers got emails saying “STOP ALL ACTIONS WITH TERMINATIONS”.
The impact was still reverberating on Thursday.
“Morale is shit and not a lot of work is getting done because people are shell shocked,” said one Energy Department source.
Musk, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office next to Trump last week, said, “We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly.”
Trump stormed back into power with a series of startling statements and policies including not ruling out sending US troops to seize Greenland, starting peace talks with Vladimir Putin without Ukraine, and proposing to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
He has been credited with playing a key role in the Gaza ceasefire in the Middle East, and got Mexico and Canada to tighten their borders, at least slightly, with the threat of tariffs.
The US Department of Agriculture this week rehired three workers it fired on February 14 from a laboratory network critical to the agency’s response on bird flu, said Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.
Bird flu has infected nearly 1,000 dairy cattle and killed millions of poultry in the past year in an ongoing outbreak that has also sickened nearly 70 people and sharply raised the price of eggs.
At the Bonneville Power Administration, a public power agency that runs a large hydroelectric dam in the Pacific Northwest, about 200 workers were fired last week.
About 30 were rehired this week after a public outcry over the reliability of the electric supply, according to an aide to Democratic US Senator Patty Murray of Washington State.
