The NRC Lost A Sixth Of Its Staff… So Why Are Reactor Reviews Getting Faster?

For the past year, critics have warned that DOGE gutted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just as the nuclear renaissance was getting started.

If the president really wants to kickstart the “nuclear renaissance,” gutting the NRC of its expertise and rubber-stamping projects isn’t the way to go. It will only slow processes down, increase the potential for accidents, and erode public trust.

— Josh Freed (@jsfreed) July 30, 2025

The NRC’s headcount fell more than 16% between July 2024 and June 2026, from 2,957 to 2,477, according to a new GAO report. About 740 people left, only 270 were hired, and attrition hit 12.4% in FY2025, up from 7.6% a year earlier.

But the GAO never says the agency is broken. Instead, their report says “most stakeholders and NRC officials told us they were not concerned about NRC’s ability to ensure safety or the timely review of applications.”

Some have also characterized the staffing reduction as a purge. The GAO report objectively contradicts that claim, as the NRC let go of just four, and nine in ten departures were retirements or resignations.

Hiring stalled under a federal freeze, but by this recent spring new hires outnumbered departures again.

“The NRC did not lose its way or the ability to perform its mission,” Commissioner David Wright, who chaired the agency through the exodus, said in March. “Instead, everyone stepped up.”

Would keeping them have even mattered?

What the GAO is unable to prove is that the NRC would be ready for the coming wave of applications if all those people had stayed.

History suggests it wouldn’t be. When the GAO sounded a similar alarm in 2007, the NRC was bracing for “at least 20 applications for 29 new nuclear power reactors.” It staffed up to about 4,000 employees by 2010, still took nearly four years to license Vogtle 3 and 4, and watched most of the other applications fizzle.

In other words, the NRC shed roughly 1,000 people in the 14 years before anyone had heard of DOGE.

“In the last renaissance, the NRC hired a lot of people for what they anticipated in new reactor licensing applications,” Chairman Ho Nieh told House lawmakers in April. This time, “instead of just hiring people to handle the work, we are fundamentally looking at how we make these decisions.”

What the GAO didn’t weigh

The report also doesn’t test whether that streamlining has made up for the people the NRC lost. 

It’s “too soon to assess,” the GAO says, and it skips the math of how many applications are coming, how many hours each takes under the new rules, and how many qualified reviewers that requires.

NRC officials told the GAO that new efficiency measures could cut the agency’s staffing needs by about 300 full-time positions. That’s more than half of what it lost on net.

Asked about staffing at a May Senate hearing, Doug Weaver, the newest commissioner, said the NRC 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.”

And it’s already showing. Late last month, the NRC approved construction of the first BWRX-300 small modular reactor in 14 months. “Four months ahead of schedule is what the new NRC looks like,” Nieh said.

But Chairman Nieh is still missing the bulk of the celebration. Back when the NRC was looking at a significantly larger staff, the estimated timeline was 36 months to hear back for the same license. Today, they have less staff and finished 22 months faster.

The DOGE operative

Seth Cohen, the ex-Kirkland & Ellis lawyer who came to the NRC with DOGE and later became the Energy Department’s chief counsel for nuclear policy, sat on the steering committee overseeing that rewrite. ProPublica’s Avi Asher-Schapiro made him the face of the “DOGE Goes Nuclear” piece.

Yet Cohen told an American Nuclear Society conference last November that “the NRC is almost certainly going to be growing in the coming years,” and denied the goal was to “make this the tiniest Nuclear Regulatory Commission it can be.”

When he left government in June, Asher-Schapiro labeled Cohen “one of the key figures reshaping the regulatory environment to benefit Silicon Valley-backed advanced reactor firms.”

Cohen’s reply? “Get bent, soyboy”

Now that I’m out of government, I can finally respond for myself: Get bent, soyboy. We didn’t do this for “Silicon Valley . . . companies.” We did this for you, for your family, your community, your state, your nation, and your species. Nuclear energy provides the safest, highest density, reliable power available on our planet. My career colleagues at DOE and NRC inspired me to think about nuclear as a way to forge American steel and electrolyze aluminum without releasing particulate matter, to desalinate water in the Middle East and save humanity from resource wars. By rejecting the false narratives and Cold War hysteria, we can secure the next American century while raising whole countries out of poverty. Do you really think I left an incredible career at Kirkland, paid out of pocket for an apartment in DC and dozens of cross-country trips, and left my family on the west coast because I wanted to enrich people I never met before taking this job? I came to D.C. to do something that mattered, to satisfy a driving curiosity (more on that later), and, most importantly, to serve. As I learned more about nuclear energy and its history, I developed a conviction that one nuclear’s biggest issues was a culture of cynicism: nothing new or exciting could happen because it would end in disappointment, and that militated against rocking the boat even a tiny bit. The career staff in government and their industry counterparts lived through dark winters before and stopped believing that warm springs could bloom into summers. I have two core philosophies. First, I believe in ruthless optimism. Rational decision making requires detached risk analysis. But we also cannot win if we believe we can lose. Merging the two requires orienting teams around driving missions. That way, when a real opportunity presents itself, you can take a huge swing. If I take credit for anything—honestly, almost all of the success belongs to the incredible and dedicated people at @ENERGY and @NRCgov—it’s countering the cultural rot and morass that risked forfeiting American excellence. My colleagues and I gave cover to the scientists and engineers, which freed them up to focus on delivering safe power. And, as success materialized, they started to dream again. That’s why the pilot program succeeded, and why I feel confident about the future of NLICs and NRC reform. Nobody needs me anymore because they can innovate on their own. My second core philosophy is to assume positive intent. Avi, I know that you heard about my real motivations from multiple people you interviewed when preparing your hit piece on me. Rather than telling that story, one which could help inspire another generation of people to use their talents for the greater good, you ignored them. Instead, you implied that Peter Thiel recruited me for nefarious purposes. (I’ve never met him, but, @peterthiel, if you’re reading this, I’m a huge fan!) Nuclear regulation starts and ends with safety. I promised everyone I worked with that I would resign before doing or pushing for anything that could compromise public safety. But I also distinguished between real safety and performative bullshit. That’s what the careers came to embrace, too. We love nuclear, why would we do anything that could risk threatening its future? America faces a crossroads. We can either trod a road of cultural decay or hike our way back to the peak of global innovation. Join me on the latter path. Correct the fear mongering and conspiracies and tell the story of America’s great reindustrialization. Tell the story of our public servants, our great entrepreneurs, our scientific dominance. Tell the real story about how DOGE went nuclear.

— Seth Cohen (@OverReactor1776) June 20, 2026

The real competition

Cohen himself now sits on the board of fuel maker Standard Nuclear, which points to the NRC’s real staffing problem.

The agency has always lost people to industry, but never to this many well-funded startups at once. Investors have poured $4.6 billion into U.S. nuclear startups this year, as we noted last week, and half the stakeholders the GAO interviewed had hired former NRC staff.

“They’re hiring people from the NRC and they’re paying them far more than the federal government pays,” Nieh said in June.

The NRC hasn’t fought back much on pay. Of the hiring, pay and bonus tools Congress handed it in the ADVANCE Act, it has used only 18 performance bonuses worth $335,000 combined. Officials told the GAO that targeted raises would be hard to justify without raising pay across whole job series, which would likely mean higher fees for applicants.

The GAO’s fix? Finish a workforce planning tool that has already missed two target dates, and set metrics for whether the NRC’s hiring tools are enough.

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