Trump brings DOGE staff into nuclear regulation

A 31-year-old lawyer from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team chaired a technical licensing discussion at Idaho National Laboratory last summer despite having no nuclear background, according to Ars Technica citing ProPublica documents. Within months, Seth Cohen was installed as chief counsel for nuclear policy at the US Department of Energy, as the Trump administration pushed to rewrite nuclear rules quickly to expand power supply for AI data centres.

The change is showing up inside the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself. ProPublica staffing data cited by Ars indicates more than 400 people have left the NRC since Trump took office, with the heaviest losses in reactor and nuclear materials safety teams and among staff with more than a decade of experience. Hiring has not kept pace, leaving fewer experienced reviewers to check vendor claims at the same moment political leadership is demanding faster throughput.

According to Ars Technica, the White House has also treated the NRC less as an independent safety regulator and more as an implementer. Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson last June after Hanson spoke publicly about the importance of agency independence—the first time an NRC commissioner had been fired. At the Idaho meeting, Cohen told staff to assume “the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” a line that captures the new hierarchy: the regulator is being asked to compress review time while being stripped of the authority that makes “no” credible.

That matters because nuclear licensing is not a software release cycle. The NRC’s value is largely procedural: it forces applicants to document assumptions, quantify failure modes, and carry the cost of delay until they can demonstrate compliance. When personnel drains and political deadlines collide, the easiest parts to cut are the parts that do not immediately stop a project—documentation, independent verification, and conservative safety margins. The short-term beneficiary is the developer with a financing schedule and a data-centre customer; the long-term bill arrives as higher incident risk, higher insurance and capital costs, and a regulator that has less institutional memory to defend its own standards.

The shift is also a form of outsourcing in reverse. Silicon Valley money is flowing into a new generation of nuclear startups, and the administration is rewriting rules to match the pace those companies want, Ars reports. But if the state accelerates approvals while simultaneously thinning the expert workforce that catches errors, the risk does not disappear—it is redistributed. Companies can capture upside from faster market entry, while the downside of a rare but catastrophic failure remains socialised across taxpayers, downwind communities, and the wider industry that would face a political backlash.

At Idaho National Laboratory, the debate over radiation exposure drifted into gallows humour—“they’ve been downwind before,” one participant joked, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and cited by Ars. The meeting ended, and the policy machine kept moving.

The NRC is still the agency that signs the licence, but the people who used to slow the pen are leaving.