John Z Black

John Z Black Mar 23, 2026 Policy, Law & Governance #doge #nrc #nuclear-safety #governance #regulatory #policy

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

That quote reportedly came from Seth Cohen, a 31-year-old lawyer, five years out of law school, no background in nuclear science, nuclear engineering, or nuclear regulation. He said it in a meeting at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. According to Ars Technica, he was chairing that meeting.

That’s where we are.

The NRC oversees every civilian nuclear facility in the United States: reactors, fuel processing plants, research facilities, radioactive material storage. Its independence from political pressure isn’t an abstract principle – it’s structural. The entire architecture of civilian nuclear oversight is built on the assumption that technical safety decisions won’t be made by people who answer to whoever is in the White House. That’s been load-bearing since the 1970s.

Cohen was placed at the NRC through DOGE. He chaired technical meetings including one at Idaho National Laboratory. When NRC career staff raised radiation safety concerns, he reportedly dismissed them.

Whether he said that quote as fact, warning, or casual aside doesn’t matter. That’s not how a regulator is supposed to work. The NRC isn’t supposed to do whatever anyone tells it to do. That’s the entire point.

The timing makes this worse. Oil prices roughly doubled after the Iran War, which has accelerated every political push for nuclear energy. More reactors, faster permitting, expanded capacity. When pressure to approve and accelerate nuclear projects is at its highest, the safety regulator needs to be most technically grounded and most insulated from political interference. The opposite appears to be happening.

Nuclear facilities are also increasingly targeted by cyberattacks. The NRC sets cybersecurity requirements for these facilities, reviews security programs, inspects and enforces. Strip the technical rigor out of that agency, insert someone who views it as subordinate to political direction, and the entire chain weakens.

NRC career staff were raising safety concerns. They got dismissed. Someone with nuclear expertise should be in those rooms.

That’s not a complicated ask.

Full story on the DOGE placement at the NRC and what it means for nuclear oversight