NNSA’s Safety and Budget Offices Accounted for 27% of the Broader Workforce Decline

Two offices carried a disproportionate share of the decline

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Environment, Safety, and Health office and Management and Budget office together lost 79 federal employees between the first quarter of fiscal 2025 and the second quarter of fiscal 2026. They accounted for 27.3% of the 289-position decline in the broader office-by-office workforce table, despite representing 13.1% of that table’s starting workforce.

What’s the Scoop With Broach calculated those shares from Table 4 of a Government Accountability Office report released October 16. The safety office fell from 79 employees to 60; Management and Budget fell from 277 to 217. Combined, their staffing dropped 22.2%, compared with 10.6% for the broader table. This is a concentration of personnel losses, not a measurement of failures, accidents or dollars misspent.

The accountability question is whether a department overseeing nuclear-weapons modernization retained the federal capacity to supervise that work. The document supports a specific test: track the rebuilding or reassignment of oversight duties in the offices losing staff most rapidly, rather than treating a single agency-wide percentage as a complete picture.

Why two valid totals differ

The report’s principal staffing series fell from 1,991 employees to 1,755, a reduction of 236, or 11.9%. That series covers employees funded through the Federal Salaries and Expenses account. Table 4 also includes Naval Reactors, the Office of Secure Transportation and the Naval Reactors Laboratory Field Office, funded through other appropriations. It therefore starts at 2,716 and ends at 2,427.

We used Table 4’s own total for the two-office calculation. Dividing their 79-position loss by the narrower 236-position total would mix populations and overstate their share. The broader table’s 10.6% decline and the headline series’ 11.9% decline are not contradictory findings.

Both analyses exclude the Savannah River Field Office because employees transferred into NNSA from another Energy Department office during the period, complicating comparisons. Neither series is a count of the roughly 70,000 management-and-operating contractor personnel NNSA oversees. A federal staffing decline cannot be reported as an equivalent percentage reduction in the entire nuclear enterprise.

Mission-critical losses also exceeded their starting share

Within the narrower staffing series, employees in designated mission-critical occupational series fell from 983 to 849—a loss of 134. That is 56.8% of the 236-person net decline, while those occupational series represented 49.4% of the starting workforce. The mission-critical group itself shrank 13.6%. These are our calculations using the report’s consistently scoped totals.

The classification is occupational, not a case-by-case judgment that every other employee was dispensable. NNSA told GAO that people in additional series could also be considered mission-critical. The figures therefore do not identify all indispensable positions or establish that any particular safety function ceased.

The record also shows uneven outcomes. The Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation office grew from 67 to 69, and the Office of Secure Transportation’s designated mission-critical count increased by 13 during the peak-to-end period. Those counterexamples matter: the report describes a redistribution of capacity as well as a net decline.

The agency’s response and what the record cannot settle

GAO attributes the decline to limited hiring and employee separations, primarily retirements and resignations. During the hiring-freeze period from the second quarter of fiscal 2025 through the first quarter of fiscal 2026, NNSA hired 35 employees using the national-security exception. Of 256 separations during that period, 112 participated in the government-wide deferred-resignation program. These are flows over a specified period, not numbers to add to the later net headcount decline.

The report excludes the temporary February 2025 terminations of 163 probationary or trial-period employees, because those terminations were rescinded in March and almost all returned. Table 3 records no separations through a reduction in force in its four-quarter period. Describing the entire decline as permanent mass firings would misstate the evidence.

NNSA officials told GAO they had resumed limited hiring after the second quarter of fiscal 2026 and were exploring technology and changes in recruitment to improve efficiency. They also described increased workloads and lost institutional knowledge. Management and Budget was being reorganized as of August 2026, a material qualification when interpreting that office’s decline. NNSA supplied technical comments incorporated into the report.

Our reporting method was to read the staffing tables, explanatory footnotes, methods and agency comments, then reconcile the denominators and calculate the two-office and mission-critical shares. The data end in the second quarter of fiscal 2026; they are not a current October headcount or proof of a nuclear-security incident. GAO says a separate review of long-term workforce planning is planned for early 2027. No new interview or site visit was conducted by this publication.