This week, more than one thousand employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the country’s nuclear stockpile, monitors nuclear waste, and works on anti-proliferation efforts around the world, were furloughed. They were the latest victims of the ongoing government shutdown.
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As one of the country’s nuclear-research and weapons epicenters, with the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque stands to be particularly hard hit by this new round of furloughs—though the paucity of information around them means it is not clear exactly how many New Mexican nuclear workers will be sent home. And it comes on top of an array of other federal cutbacks that have already left the state reeling; New Mexico has long been dependent on federal dollars—indeed, only DC and Hawaii are more reliant on federal contracts, federal jobs and federal payments for SNAP and other social benefits.
Now, I have never thought that nuclear weapons were anything other than an abomination, and to my mind it is a vile, hubristic, military strategy to build ever-deadlier nuclear bombs, machines of death capable of wiping out tens of millions of lives in an instant—but if a country is going to stockpile these purveyors of annihilation, it seems only common sense that at the very least it should pay its experts to safeguard them and should ensure that the facilities in which they work are fully staffed. Declaring such workers to be non-essential is the epitome of short-sightedness.
After news broke about the impending furloughs, the Department of Energy released a hyper-partisan statement blaming the Democrats—another in a long string of comments from an array of government agencies attacking the Democrats for the shutdown, all of which stand in clear violation of the Hatch Act, which prevents the professional civil service from issuing partisan political statements.
In addition to violating the law, these missives are, of course, nonsense: the Trump administration has somehow found the money to pay soldiers during the shutdown. It has found the money to keep ICE’s and CBP’s foul immigrant snatch-squads roaming the streets of America’s cities. It found the money for a shocking, and none-too-subtle, display of the Marines’ firepower on Saturday—the day of the huge No Kings protests around the country. That propaganda exercise, one intended to demonstrate the shock-and-awe powers controlled by the federal government in an era in which Trump has said he is “at war” with cities such as Portland and Chicago, and has sent the Marines into Los Angeles, involved a use of live ammunition from Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, and forced state officials to shut a 17-mile stretch of the I-5 freeway, the major north-south transportation artery in the state, for several hours. Trump’s administration has, more generally, declared numerous security-related parts of the federal government to involve “essential services” and has ordered those workers to continue to show up for work. Furloughing nuclear safety teams instead of also declaring them essential, is, quite simply, a high-stakes bluff designed to escalate pressure on Democrats to cave in their shutdown fight.
As a historian friend of mine, who specializes in exploring the rise of authoritarianism in different countries, noted, it’s not merely a “government shutdown” when an authoritarian regime picks and chooses what to fund and what to strip money from in the way that we are seeing at the moment. Rather, it’s the ultimate use of raw, executive, power. Security functions are being beefed up. Social safety net, environmental, public health, educational and labor protection functions are being destroyed. And vital jobs such as those in the NNSA are being used as pawns in a struggle for political dominance.
Making matters worse, Trump is using the shutdown to very explicitly try to do financial damage to parts of the country that oppose his extreme agenda. Blue cities and states, including New Mexico, are seeing projects and jobs and social programs vital to their interests put on hold or even permanently blocked – witness the extraordinary decision to yank federal funding from the $16 billion Gateway tunnel project, an already-begun effort to build a new railway tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York; or the decision to put the kibosh on billions of dollars of renewable energy projects in sixteen blue states around the country—New Mexico is amongst the states hit by this decision. Hydrogen technology investments in California were shredded; meanwhile, similar investments in dyed-red Texas were kept afloat.
Additionally, $11 billion worth of Army Core of Engineers projects in a dozen states, almost all of them blue, and, again, including New Mexico, were put on ice. The one non-blue state included on the list was New Hampshire, where a Republican governor has aroused Trump’s ire by opposing his demand that red states indulge in mid-decade congressional gerrymandering.
There’s no mystery to the motivations in play here. Trump is on record as saying he wants to use the shutdown to permanently corrode “Democrat” agencies and programs, and OMB chief Russell Vought has reiterated that the Administration sees this as an opportunity to go after projects beloved by their political opponents.
This isn’t how democracy is supposed to function. The president has a responsibility to represent all Americans, not to behave like a churlish, brutal warlord out to destroy parts of the government and the country he regards as not sufficiently loyal to him as an individual.
