The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is pushing back against an Associated Press (AP) report claiming mass layoffs at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, as part of a larger federal employee purge.
Earlier this week, AP reported that the Trump administration had paused the firing of hundreds of federal employees working in the nation’s nuclear weapons programs. Citing unnamed officials, the report claimed that up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly dismissed late last Thursday—some losing email access before even learning they had been fired. According to AP, one of the hardest-hit locations was Pantex, where approximately 30% of the cuts allegedly occurred, affecting around 105 employees.
However, DOE Press Secretary Ben Dietderich refuted those claims, calling the reporting “misleading and poorly sourced.” In a statement to High Plains Pundit on Thursday, Dietderich clarified that while the DOE had indeed begun dismissing certain probationary federal employees per the Trump administration’s mandate, no employees at Pantex were among them.
“The claim that 100 federal employees were laid off at Pantex is incorrect,” Dietderich stated. “Pantex Plant is operated by contractors, not federal employees, and therefore no employees working at the plant were impacted by the probationary dismissals.”
Dietderich did confirm that two probationary employees at a DOE field office in Amarillo were let go, but he emphasized that they were not Pantex employees.
The AP report initially suggested that many of the dismissed employees were caught off guard, some finding themselves locked out of their offices the following morning. However, the DOE has maintained that the dismissals were part of standard federal workforce management and that claims of mass layoffs at Pantex were inaccurate.
