WASHINGTON — National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn't have their new contact information.
In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, "The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel."
The individuals the letter refers to had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts. NNSA, which is within the Department of Energy and oversees the nation's nuclear stockpile, cannot reach these employees directly and is now asking recipients of the email, "Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people's personal contact emails."
Trump administration wants to un-fire nuclear safety workers but can't figure out how to reach them
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-wants-un-fire-nuclear-safety-workers-cant-figure-rcna192345
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Trump and Elon did the firings so haphazardly that they deactivated the employees' Unclassified emails BEFORE they sent them their firing notice, so many didn't even receive them.
Even funnier, they DIDN'T deactivate their Q-classified network access or email accounts. They literally fired hundreds of nuclear scientists but let them have full access to nuclear weapon data for a couple days while they were finishing up the workweek.
!r-slurs !fedposters !glowies !the_donald !khive
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Love how much of a teeth-grinding annoyance it is for obtaining a Q clearance but drop the ball on this shit
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Makes you wonder how many glowie gooks and spooky slavs are going to try to get nuclear secrets from these dudes
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Wonder if that's the intent
But never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity I guess
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It was 100% stupidity. Trump and Elon didn't know that they fired 20% of the modern Manhattan Project. The firings spanned from nuclear weapons program managers, Los Alamos scientists, Livermore scientists, the sites where nuclear components are manufactured, the plant where the nukes are all assembled by hand, the special operators who quietly deliver the weapons directly to the nuclear submarines, all across the board.
One report said that it takes one full year to train a floor tech to get certified on the assembly of a single nuclear weapon, and there are multiple weapons. And it takes 1-2 years to complete a Q background check and personally interview their past employers and neighbors and friends. And they can't have history of any drug use. And they have to be willing to move to Amarillo Texas.
Good luck replacing them if they're already too pissed off to come back.
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Considering that their skills are in demand, other countries doubtless want their expertise and that they just got a big FU from the country, couldn't blame them if they said "frick you" right back or used their now-apparent bargaining position
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With their classified network access and printer connections intact, and their employer taking away their ability to feed their family as a political stunt, makes you wonder.
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it's so weird how when you elect wildly incompetent r-slurs that have room temp IQs bad things happen, who could have honestly seen it coming.
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Maybe if your guys didn't endorse White genocide, babykilling, sterilizing children, criminal BIPOCs, mass homelessness, and gun control we wouldn't have to vote for r-slurs
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You don't think they'll come back for such a kush job?
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You've got glowies living in your walls, you live in rural Texas, and the president is trying to frick you over. Kind of a shitty spot if you ask me. I'd say 95% retained in the short term, but actively looking elsewhere and will barely give 2 weeks notice. 50% retention after 2 years leading to having to retrain noobs.
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Uh huh. That's why they already left their job a year ago for such higher paying opportunities elsewhere. You little redditors are eating the journo bait and screaming that this is a big deal. When will you learn? It's been overblown.
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Pantex is a the final assembly plant for nukes and also serves for their maintenance. It's in Amarillo Texas. It's a skilled technician job, not PhD research. It's a high hazard production facility which requires a Q clearance. You have to get certified to assemble each weapon and it takes a long time.
It's not a steel factory you can turn on and off. It's a bespoke facility that does one thing that nobody else does. This isn't journo bait, this is the reality of logistics and operations and managing a qualified workforce.
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Hmm… Come back to your GS-13 or whatever job in this highest COL area in the US where we blame you for everything from trains to FEMA or go work in industry or with the Chingchongs, or Russoids for hundreds of thousands and the ability to kill people who offend you
Federal Jobs are only cush for people without credentials, anyone that's a STEM PhD can certainly make more just about anywhere else—the only benefit is a good work-life balance to spend time with your family and something of a retirement, but the Wizard of H1-Bs wants to do away with that and has correctly identified that the FLSA is why the Orientals will overtake us any day now, so what's the point?
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Yeah yeah yeah, that's why they already quit the job last year. R-slur.
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As someone against nuclear proliferation I think this is a good thing t
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The rigor of allowing people to directly handle nuclear weapons? Yeah I think there is wisdom there.
Firing them because you are on a crusade to fire as many people as possible regardless of what they actually do?
Less wise.
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This is why they should be managed by contractors instead of directly by the executive branch (if the operating agency is "U.S. Department of Energy" then RUN), gives a bit more of a buffer from political r-slurs assuming the contractor knows how to keep cash on hand.
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well separation of powers and the constitution along with the civil service reform act are supposed to prevent that but meh
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great so this place is just reddit now
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i think it is foolish to look for a larger plan in anything trump is doing, they fired all probationary employees solely because they were the only people they could easily fire
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Sure, if they want to go to prison for 20+ years.
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Tell me about Q clearance. I'm a dirty pleb and don't know.
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Basically you're getting vetted to be privy to DoE's sensitive nuclear data and related materials (falls under the term Restricted Data or RD) and involves extensive paperwork, crossing your t's and dotting your i's to make sure there's absolutely no mistakes/conflicting data submitted, hired investigators snooping into your personal life (neighbors), your finances, and professional life (previous employers), numerous drug tests, etc. that can take 6 months to a year or more to finally complete.
Imagine being subjected to all this nonsense just to be erroneously terminated from your position due to sheer r-sluration
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The military and glowies use a classification system of Secret and Top Secret. The clearance name and classification of material match. That is to say, if you need to view information that is classified as Secret then you need to possess a Secret-level clearance.
The department of energy has a classification of Secret and Top Secret as well. This gives them access to military Secret and Top Secret data. But the names of their clearances are L (Secret) and Q (Top Secret).
L allows them to handle nuclear weapons information at the Secret level, and Q allows them to handle nuclear weapons information at the Top Secret level.
This allows the nuclear weapon scientists to keep nuclear secrets out of the military, which was deemed a necessary method of separating knowledge.
The Dept of Energy designs and builds warheads. The Dept of Defense designs and builds the missiles and bombs and planes and submarines.
As an additional detail, military Secret and Top Secret clearances are regulated by Executive Order, while L and Q clearances are regulated by Congressional legislation.
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Yes. The Manhattan project split into the Army Special Weapons Program and the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC later became the Department of Energy.
The separation remains today, with each department only building one half of each doomsday device.
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Okay but why? Afraid the army would become too powerful?
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Pretty much. Weapons had become so powerful that they carried massive political impact. You can't just have the military with the unilateral ability to use a city-killer. The President has to make that decision.
The logic sequence of the debate led them to the conclusion that the President needed to have 100% control over the weapons.
Even the department of energy is separated by who does what. One group makes the plutonium shape, one does the explosives, one does the fuzes, one does the security equipment. But none of them know the full details of how everyone else does their part.
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Also less risk of compromise when everyone is limited to the information they need to do their job
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Nukes are energy
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So is my fist hitting your face
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Just want to emphasize this part. Nearly all "classified information" authority stems entirely from the president. He can release CI or change people's clearance on a whim. Nuclear secrets are the exception to this.
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That's why it was super shitty when he got caught with SRD documents at his house.
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How was subredditdrama involved?
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Uh huh, go on
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tf when no pagers in the event of a communication crises
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They should have secure cellphones but I assume they took them
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Those exist but the only people I've ever heard of with cellphones with access to classified information are Generals.
Government cell phones use encryption and internal authentication controls. But they're just iPhones. And yeah they took them away immediately along with their IDs and work laptops.
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Yeah those phones are pretty rare because NSA or whoever have to very carefully manage the encryption pipeline and not let the phones go missing. High end stuff
Fortunately iMessage has really good encryption
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Some even have a SIPR token slot on the phone case.
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This is basically a missed connections craigslist ad lmao
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You: running critical infrastructure
Me: congratulating bigballs on figuring out who Seaquilda Tabaze is
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the govt doesn't keep up to date records of critical service employees?!
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if we give more money to this
foundational agency
then they will start doing a better job.
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It's literally the Manhattan Project. They manage Los Alamos, Livermore, the Pantex plant where nukes are assembled, and the labs where components are built. They design, build, maintain, and transport nukes. They do subcritical nuclear testing too.
The entire US and NATO defense strategy is based around the nuclear arsenal. The only reason they aren't a part of the DOD is because they need to keep nuclear weapon design information separate from the military.
!fedposters !glowies !ifrickinglovescience this man might actually be r-slurred
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Look dude. Know your audience. You want to notify us when you come across a dramatard that isn't r-slurred. That's the unexpected.
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It could be a larp as well. Double post-reverse-irony.
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Too deep.
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it's
literally
the manhattan project that means they can never suffer a budget cut nor layoffs.
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Yeah the real way to improve things is to slash budgets and fire critical staff, that always works
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we should pentuple their budget
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You jest, but there is actually a case to be made for pentupling the budget on strategic weapons and cutting the budget on conventional forces.
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If I was North Korea I'd get as many fricking nukes as fast as possible too. I wouldn't win a nuclear exchange, but nobody wants to have a single city hit by even one at all.
The entire backbone of the US and NATO defense strategy is literally nuclear superiority.
Japan is pooping rocks that China will obtain nuclear parity with the US and start acting in non-nuclear regional aggression.
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Seems like a foregone conclusion. The NPT has been ailing for decades and Donald doesn't even know what it is. Proliferation seems inevitable, which of course means an exchange is increasingly likely.
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He's saying that the firings happened because they did a bad job, which is factually wrong. The firings happened because they were new hires under probation. Nothing bad was discovered.
The administration realized that their cookie cutter method didn't account for the nuclear scientists who make nuclear weapons and had to backpedal.
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Why are so many essential employees there under probation?
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It's a rule for new hires. There's a natural attrition rate for a workforce, either through retirement or finding a different job. When people hire on it's a mandatory 1-2 year probation period.
Depending on workload projections some years have higher hiring rates than others, while a lot have net negative by allowing people to quit without backfilling.
The US is actively modernizing all of its existing nukes as they age beyond what industry can maintain them with old tech, for instance.
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/us-modernization-2024-update
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Interesting. It just seems odd that, if they're just slashing all the probationary employees first as seems to be the case, that there would be this large number of essential workers who hadn't been there for more than three years, to take the outside estimate for the length of probation.
I'm inclined to think it's something like that there were a few that were considered a mistake to let go; there was another report recently that another department haggled up the number of employees they could keep, so there's clearly not much thought put in to this. But I suspect the scope of employees in the specific circumstances of the OP is much smaller than they're suggesting.
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Between the people taking the voluntary regination and the new hires, the ballpark guess was 20% of the nuclear workforce. Well, at least that particular group. They just do the warheads.
Gotta remember the DOD (AF, Navy) design the actual missiles and bombs and planes/ships to carry them. They were subject to the same firings but I haven't started reading the details yet since it's so dispersed. You have to look at the JCOS, program offices, and STRATCOM.
What people don't want to admit is that if they fired every single fed, their salaries add up to around $300B but the budget is $6T. Defense contracts bill $500-600/hr for educated labor, about 3-4 times as much as what feds cost, and there's at least a 10:1 ratio of private contractors to feds. That's where all the money goes.
If they wanted to be smart and persuasive, they should have just said "we don't think the government should be involved in X Y and Z functions, so we will cease doing those." That way they can eliminate the overall cost instead of just the lowest cost and smallest proportion of the labor.
Example you can fire all the feds involved with the B21 bomber and not put a dent in the cost. Or you can just cancel the bomber.
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Well, yes. There's loads of better ways to do this but I think he's using the same thing he did with Twitter, clearing out the majority and then hiring back the ones who it turned out he actually needed. Has a different effect when you do it to a government than a website.
Though it creates a lot of drama and seems to get rid of a shitload of dangerhairs and makework roles, so I can see the appeal.
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You sat down and wrote all this shit. You could have done so many other things with your life. What happened to your life that made you decide writing novels of bullshit here was the best option?
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Twitter is bankrupt.
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Fricking nuclear science is a jewish lie anyway
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Quark-Gluon interactions is Kaballah
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red-antiwhite
red-antiamerican
red-antiwestern
green-anticapitalist
green-antiamerican
green-antieuropean
blue-antiaryan
blue-antiwestern
blue-antiwhite
t. - The Talmud, Quantum Chromodynamics
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Which is weird because the DoD b-words at me to update my contact info like every six months and make sure everything is in order.
But the thing is I'll update my dod directory but it won't be updated on some army system so I'll still get text messages and alerts for that army base when I now work for a navy base elsewhere. It's annoying as shit
So who the frick knows how these clearance nuclear people but I'm not surprised their contact info is lost in the cracks. That's not Trump that's just poor government bureaucratic bullshit
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Army-issued CACs won't work on USAF unclassified networks. Some people have three JWICS accounts if they have to travel and work at a different agency's SCIF because they're all segregated. Imagine having to take the Cyber Security Awareness challenge for three separate agencies in a year.
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Id probably kill myself. I can't stand Marty that time travelling bastard
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Is he the dude that tries to get you to install his home made game on a work machine?
Did you ever have to take Antiterrorism Level 1? You don't even have to read the material, just pretend you're in a Jack Ryan movie.
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Nah mine had these videos you navigate and click through but the premise is some dod guy comes from the future where the government is crippled by cyber security leaks and vulnerabilities and the only way to save the future is to answer some Security+ and some clearance quizzes.
It was annoying but they did add a feature where if you took it before you just answer like 5 questions on each section and skip the rest.
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Oh yes that's the new one. The old one was better. PewDiePie even got his hands on it and played the "game."
Work bros trying to get you to Napster at work. Amateur game coders bringing in DVDs of their vidya. Some thug stealing your govie phone at lunch.
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Oh god yeah old but def similar. Its funny with all these phising the one thing they dont account for is I give 0 shit about my email.
Oh you sent me an email with a link? I'm literally too lazy to check.
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Inbox (2376 unread)
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I did. One deployment I had a USMC email, a Centcom email, an USAF email and then a highside email and it was a b-word when people were like "you get that email I sent?"
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gotta set up those auto forwards from all your JWICS to each other, but not reciprocally lol
and then an auto-reply on each one to the sender to also generate a NIPR email to you tell you which one they sent a message to
Unless you have a switchbox with NIPR/SIPR/JWICS
did you ever have to get a Gold JWICS account? It's for special TS-SCI laptops to plug into commercial internet anywhere they set up a TSWA. They have their own fricking network and help desk and keys too
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You will never find me
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None of that explains why that agency doesn't have alternative ways of contacting those former employees. Honestly, it sounds like the journosluts are exaggerating things again (and again and again and again).
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Wrong comment, we're making fun of shit here
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Earlier you weren't.
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Sounds like a well-run and efficient operation.
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Trump made them fire them so fast that their emails got deactivated before they got the firing email.
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this sounds line an NNSA issue
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They don't run their own HR anymore. Nobody does.
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even so, aren't these people like super high clearance or something, like aren't they under cia/nsa/fbi
24/7?
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Probably, but those agencies just aren't in the business of updating HR records. Like, some glowie isn't going to pass along someone's contact information so that their home agency can update their profile.
I'm guessing that this is really a partial case and that most employees' personal contact information is available. I mean how else did they contact them to hire them in the first place?
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Drunken hook up.
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Staffing at the CIA/NSA/FBI has been streamlined to just the Director of National Intelligence and her PR people.
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If they were critical then why were they so easily fired
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They never planned on firing these people
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They keep emergency contact info unless they didn't update it or they're probably just not picking up the phone
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That or the journos are blowing things out of proportion because of the telephone game.
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