US nuclear regulator lost a sixth of its staff yet reactor reviews got faster

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission lost more than 16 percent of its staff between July 2024 and June 2026, falling from 2,957 employees to 2,477 — and last month it approved construction of the first BWRX-300 small modular reactor, completing the review in 14 months, four months ahead of schedule. Under the agency's earlier, larger staffing, the estimated timeline for the same licence was 36 months.

The numbers come from a GAO report that does not conclude the agency is broken. About 740 employees left during the period while 270 were hired, and attrition reached 12.4 percent in fiscal 2025, up from 7.6 percent a year earlier. The NRC let go of exactly four people; nine in ten departures were retirements or resignations. Hiring stalled under a federal hiring freeze, and by this spring new hires again outnumbered departures. Most stakeholders and NRC officials told the auditors they were not concerned about the agency's ability to ensure safety or to review applications on time.

For a year, critics had warned that DOGE gutted the commission just as a nuclear renaissance was getting started — that stripping its expertise and rubber-stamping projects would slow licensing, raise the potential for accidents and erode public trust. Some characterized the staffing reduction as a purge. The GAO's figures describe an agency that had been shrinking on its own for 14 years, from roughly 4,000 employees in 2010 to 2,957 by July 2024. The last time a renaissance was promised, in 2007, the watchdog sounded the same alarm: at least 20 applications for 29 new reactors were expected, the NRC staffed up to about 4,000 by 2010 — and still took nearly four years to license Vogtle 3 and 4. Most of the other applications from that era fizzled.

The current leadership describes a different operating logic. Chairman Ho Nieh told House lawmakers in April that instead of just hiring people to handle the work, "we are fundamentally looking at how we make these decisions." NRC officials told the GAO that new efficiency measures could cut staffing needs by about 300 full-time positions — more than half of the net staff loss. Commissioner Doug Weaver told a May Senate hearing the agency is "not simply doing the same old way of doing our work and trying to do it faster with fewer people. We're fundamentally changing the way we do licensing." Commissioner David Wright, who chaired the agency through the exodus, put it in March: "The NRC did not lose its way or the ability to perform its mission... Instead, everyone stepped up."

The GAO itself is cautious. It says it is too soon to assess whether the streamlining has made up for the lost staff, and it did not calculate how many applications are coming, how many staff hours each will take under the new rules, or how many qualified reviewers that would require. Seth Cohen, a former Kirkland & Ellis lawyer who arrived with DOGE, sat on the steering committee that rewrote the licensing process and now serves as the Energy Department's chief counsel for nuclear policy, told an American Nuclear Society conference that the NRC is "almost certainly going to be growing in the coming years" and denied any aim of building the smallest possible regulator.

When the agency last licensed new reactors, with a staff of about four thousand, Vogtle 3 and 4 took nearly four years. The BWRX-300 review took 14 months.