“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do.”

That’s Seth Cohen, a 31-year-old lawyer five years out of law school, addressing Department of Energy officials at the Idaho National Laboratory last summer. Cohen had no significant experience in nuclear law. He arrived via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. And according to records reviewed by ProPublica, he was already running the table on the agency that decides whether nuclear reactors are safe enough to operate.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not a household name. It is, however, the agency that stands between commercial reactor designs and the American public — widely regarded as the international gold standard for nuclear safety. The United States has not had a serious nuclear incident since Three Mile Island in 1979. That record is not an accident; it is the product of exactly the kind of independent, cautious regulation that the Trump administration now treats as an obstacle.

The Foxes Arrive

Cohen’s Idaho meeting was a preview. By summer, he and a team of DOGE operatives — including an AI medical startup investor and the president of a real estate software company — had touched down at the NRC’s suburban Maryland offices. Career officials told ProPublica they were blindsided. The new arrivals had no apparent experience with nuclear energy policy or law.

At one point, Cohen began handing out branded hats from Valar Atomics, a nuclear startup vying to build a new reactor. NRC ethics officials warned him it was a likely conflict-of-interest violation. The symbolism was worse than the infraction: an independent safety regulator’s staff being offered swag by a company they were supposed to oversee.

“Imagine you live near a nuclear power plant, and you find out a supposedly independent safety regulator — the watchdog — is going around wearing the power plant’s branded hats,” a former official told ProPublica. “Would that make you feel safe?”

Valar’s angel investors include Palmer Luckey, founder of defense contractor Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir. The company is one of three nuclear startups that sued the NRC last year, seeking to strip the agency of regulatory authority over their reactors entirely. Before Trump took office, lawyers expected the case to be quickly dismissed. Instead, new Trump appointees pushed for a settlement. The career NRC lawyer on the case quietly left.

A Rush to the Exits

The personnel numbers tell a clear story. According to ProPublica’s analysis of staffing data from the NRC and the Office of Personnel Management, over 400 people have left the agency since Trump took office. Losses are concentrated in reactor and nuclear materials safety teams and among veteran staffers with a decade or more of experience. Meanwhile, nearly 60 new staff arrived in Trump’s first year, compared with nearly 350 in Biden’s last year.

The DOE’s nuclear office has lost roughly a third of its staff, according to a January 2026 count by the Federation of American Scientists.

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. The agency’s top attorney resigned and was replaced by an oil and gas lawyer who had been working on DOGE cuts at the DOE. Lawyers from the executive office of the president have been dispatched to the NRC to oversee new rulemaking.

“The regulator is no longer an independent regulator — we do not know whose interests it is serving,” said Allison Macfarlane, who chaired the NRC under President Obama. “The safety culture is under threat.”

The AI Appetite

The throughline is energy for artificial intelligence. Trump’s executive orders directed the NRC to slash its workforce, speed up reactor approvals, and rewrite safety rules — all to quadruple nuclear output and feed data center demand. The political muscle behind this push comes from Silicon Valley: venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, both nuclear energy investors and Trump supporters. Andreessen camped out at Mar-a-Lago after the 2024 election, helping pick administration staff. Thiel personally vetted at least one candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Some industry voices insist the urgency is warranted. “I think the NRC has been frozen in time,” Brett Rampal of the consultancy Veriten told ProPublica. And there are legitimate arguments for modernising rules designed for massive light-water reactors, not the smaller advanced designs Silicon Valley firms are developing.

But speed without safeguards has a name. Investigators found that a chief cause of Japan’s Fukushima disaster was the cozy relationship between industry and its oversight body — regulatory capture that produced thin safety assessments and ignored a foreseeable tsunami.

“We knew regulatory capture led directly to Fukushima and to Chernobyl,” said Kathryn Huff, who served as assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy under Biden.

Breaking Things

The NRC is now releasing thousands of pages of revised rules governing safety plans, emergency preparedness, and licensing objections. One official working on reactor licensing, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, captured the core problem: “It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety. And that’s just the problem with going so fast — everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”

Silicon Valley’s ethos has always been “move fast and break things.” Applied to social media, that philosophy produced misinformation and eroded trust. Applied to nuclear regulation, the stakes are measured in half-lives.

In November, Cohen was made chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy. He did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

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