Editor’s note: Two days after NOTUS’ initial report, the General Services Administration revoked its lease termination request for the Carlsbad Department of Energy office.
The world has only one working deep geologic repository for nuclear waste — and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is trying to close down the 90,000-square-foot building in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where workers are tasked with directly managing the radioactive site.
Two sources confirmed to NOTUS that the General Services Administration is trying to end the government’s lease for the Skeen-Whitlock Building in Carlsbad, where at least 200 people work to supervise highly radioactive waste from the U.S.’s nuclear defense activities.
“DOE-Carlsbad Office” is listed among hundreds of government leases DOGE says have been canceled, according to its website. DOGE does not specify the program or specific building, though it has listed the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad office as costing $810,599 per year.
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The Carlsbad building was developed in the late 1990s specifically for the Department of Energy to run the Waste Isolation Pilot Program — a storage facility which currently houses more than 46 million gallons of nuclear waste in ancient salt beds more than 2,000 feet underground. Every year waste is shipped from around the country to be stored there. WIPP’s geologic repository itself is separate from the Carlsbad office building and located about 25 miles outside the city, and it remains the only operating deep geologic repository in the world for nuclear waste. Deep geologic repositories are the gold standard for long-term storage.
The building includes an emergency response center and has been part of emergency response preparation drills for radiological and chemical waste problems, such as a simulated airplane crash into the storage site.
“I just don’t get what the administration is doing. They’re telling folks to return to work when at the same time they’re closing critical offices at a nuclear waste repository. It’s just completely backwards to me,” Democratic Rep. Gabe Vasquez, who represents Carlsbad, told NOTUS. Vasquez said that his office demanded answers from the DOE and GSA on Monday about how the decision to close the facility was made and where WIPP employees would work if the office was closed.
Vasquez cited the country’s ongoing problem with storing nuclear waste. Even as Trump and Republicans have called for massively increasing nuclear energy production, the country as a whole hasn’t built any infrastructure to permanently store spent fuel. WIPP — which handles waste from defense activities, not energy production — is the exception, Vasquez noted.
“For this to be on the chopping block for DOGE and Elon Musk and the president raises some huge red flags about their process,” he said.
Individuals inside the Department of Energy were surprised and concerned about the lease termination, and at least one individual is pushing to have it reversed because they consider the facility to be an important asset for the program, a source familiar with the concerns told NOTUS.
There might not be another building available with the right size and ability to meet the needs of the office if the lease termination goes through, given that Carlsbad is a small city with a population of just over 32,000 people, a person familiar with the situation said.
“WIPP is in a very remote and rural area in southern New Mexico, we already have a hard enough time attracting employees to work here,” Vasquez said. “You’re really just playing with fire here.”
DOE-Carlsbad is one of the nuclear waste management sites with the highest employee vacancy rates and highest risk of losing more employees, according to a July 2024 Government Accountability Office report.
Sources inside the federal government who are familiar with other DOGE lease cancellations told NOTUS that the terminations cannot go into effect immediately and that regional and office leaders across the country are now appealing the decisions in situations where public safety could be put at risk.
“GSA is reviewing all options to optimize our footprint and building utilization. A component of our space consolidation plan will be the termination of many soft term leases,” said Richard Stebbins, a GSA spokesperson, in response to questions about the DOE-Carlsbad office closure specifically. “To the extent these termination affect public facing facilities and/or existing tenants, we are working with our agency partners to secure suitable alternative space. In many cases this will allow us to increase space utilization and obtain improved terms.”
The DOE press office did not respond to request for comment.
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.
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