DOGE Reshapes Nuclear Regulator as 400 Staff Exit
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- Seth Cohen, a 31-year-old lawyer who entered government through Elon Musk's DOGE team, led a 2024 meeting at Idaho National Laboratory where he downplayed radiation-exposure concerns about babies and pregnant women near Utah test sites, saying "I don't know, like 70 people live there."
- Cohen later told assembled staff to "assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do" and was promoted in November to chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he oversees a broad nuclear portfolio.
- President Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson in June — the first-ever firing of an NRC commissioner — and signed executive orders directing the agency to slash its workforce, speed reactor approvals, and rewrite safety rules, with a stated goal of quadrupling nuclear output for AI data centers.
- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has lost more than 400 employees since Trump took office, with the heaviest losses in reactor and nuclear-materials safety teams and among veterans with 10-plus years of experience; the agency hired roughly 60 new staff in Trump's first year versus nearly 350 in Biden's final year.
- Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, billionaire investors with stakes in nuclear startups and close ties to Trump, have shaped the push for deregulation: Andreessen helped pick administration staff after the 2024 election and Thiel personally vetted a candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy.
- DOGE operatives at the NRC included investors Adam Blake and Ankur Bansal with no nuclear policy background; the NRC's top attorney was replaced by oil-and-gas lawyer David Taggart transferred from DOE DOGE cuts, and Cohen was recorded distributing hats from reactor startup Valar Atomics to staff tasked with monitoring that company.
Why it matters: The NRC was long considered the international gold standard for nuclear safety and has not had a serious U.S. incident since Three Mile Island in 1979; replacing career safety staff with politically-aligned operatives while rewriting thousands of pages of regulations raises the material risk of safety lapses as the U.S. simultaneously pursues the fastest nuclear build-out in decades to feed AI power demand.
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