The Man Who Fought Back : How Biden DOE Tried to Destroy Frank Rose

artvoice.com · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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By Frank Parlato Frank A. Rose spent three decades in national security in four presidential administrations — Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden. Under President Obama, he was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Space and Defense Policy and confirmed by the Senate as Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, the third-ranking position in the Bureau of Arms Control. Frank Rose principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration In 2021, President Biden nominated him to be Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The FBI cleared him. The Senate confirmed him by voice vote. He was trusted with the United States’ nuclear arsenal. The President of the United States trusted Rose with the nuclear arsenal. The Senate agreed. The FBI found him clean. Yet Rose found he could be ousted by a handful of agency officials acting on unsubstantiated allegations they never investigated, on the word of an accuser they never challenged, without giving Rose an interview. The Department Rose Walked Into During the Biden administration, the Department of Energy and NNSA had adopted ideological preoccupations that made this not only possible but inevitable. These preoccupations had nothing to do with its mission of designing, building, and maintaining the most destructive weapons on earth. It started early with heartbreak. In late 2021, the Senate killed Build Back Better — Biden’s multitrillion-dollar social spending bill covering climate programs, childcare subsidies, and expanded healthcare. Build Back Better had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. But political appointees at DOE — the agency responsible for the nuclear arsenal — were in tears over its failure as though they worked at the Department of Health and Human Services. Rather than telling them to refocus on the mission of keeping the country safe, the DOE–White House Liaison staff asked whether they needed “mental health support.” Rose had served in multiple administrations under both parties. He had never seen anything like it. These were the people entrusted with nuclear weapons, crying about a social spending bill, and being offered therapy. Sam Brinton Then came Sam Brinton. DOE appointed Brinton — a biological male who identified as non-binary and was celebrated for appearing at official functions in women’s clothing, stiletto heels, and full makeup — as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Nuclear Energy. Press releases heralded the hire as a milestone of inclusion. The department threw its arms around Brinton as proof that the nuclear enterprise had evolved. Sam Brinton Was Big on Bringing Style to Nuclear Energy Even if Some of It Was Stolen Brinton was later arrested twice for stealing women’s luggage from airport baggage carousels, in Minneapolis and Las Vegas. The stolen bags contained thousands of dollars’ worth of women’s designer clothing and accessories. Brinton was not collecting souvenir luggage. He was stealing women’s clothes to wear. One victim, a Tanzanian fashion designer, said a bag containing irreplaceable garments worth $3,670 was taken. Brinton was caught on surveillance video walking off with it. Sam Brinton Possibly Forgot That Airports Have Security Cameras and Will Be Able to Catch Nuclear Energy Officials Who Steal Womens Luggage This was a man whom the Department of Energy had vetted, hired, celebrated, and paraded before the press as the face of progress, while he was stealing women’s clothing out of suitcases in airports. This was the environment in which Frank Rose served. The Sneha Nair Hire When NNSA leadership requested a junior political appointee for the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, Rose recommended Ariel Higuchi, a former colleague from Brookings who was capable, serious, and mission-focused. Higuchi understood the nuclear mission. She was the kind of person a country would want working on nonproliferation — someone who took the work seriously and understood that the job was about keeping nuclear weapons out of the wrong hands. Rose was overruled. The Secretary’s office selected Sneha Nair, a researcher at the Stimson Center who had co-authored an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled “Queering Nuclear Weapons: How LGBTQ+ Inclusion Strengthens Security and Reshapes Disarmament.” In the article, Nair argued that the nuclear policy community was too dominated by straight men — “cis-heteronormative,” in her language — and that this produced “groupthink” that perpetuated dangerous ideas like deterrence and crisis stability. The strategy that has prevented nuclear war for eighty years, the foundation of American national security since Hiroshima, to Nair, was a symptom of a male-dominated culture that needed to be dismantled through the application of queer theory. She argued that queer theory should “shift the perception of nuclear weapons as instruments for security” — that the $60 billion the United States spends annually on its arsenal should instead go to “education, infrastructure, and welfare.” This was not an argument for better nuclear policy. It was an argument against having nuclear weapons at all. Nair cited Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran killed at the Capitol on January 6, who had previously worked at a nuclear power plant, as evidence that nuclear facilities needed “thorough social media analysis by personnel reliability programs.” The implication was that people with conservative political views should be treated as insider threats to nuclear security, screened and surveilled the same way you would screen for espionage or sabotage. Babbitt worked as a security guard at Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant from 2015 to 2017. She caused no security incident. She committed no offense. She did her job and left. Her political radicalization, such as it was, occurred years later, after she had moved to California and left the nuclear industry. She was killed at the Capitol four years after her last day at the nuclear plant. Nair used a dead woman who had never threatened nuclear security in any way as the reason for arguing that nuclear facilities should conduct “thorough social media analysis” of their workers, meaning that holding conservative political views should be treated as a security risk on par with espionage or sabotage. This was not nuclear policy. It was political surveillance masquerading as safety, written by a researcher who had no background in nuclear security and published in a journal that had abandoned serious science for progressive advocacy. Nair’s position was that the nuclear arsenal was the problem, that the men who maintained it were the problem, and that people with the wrong politics should be purged from the enterprise. This was the person DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s office chose over Ariel Higuchi. The New York Post, Newsweek, and the Heritage Foundation all covered the story. Granholm’s DOE Jennifer Granholm Had Her Priorities At DOE, Secretary Jennifer Granholm spent more time engaging with DOE’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office than with NNSA or the nuclear weapons complex. She mandated diversity plans from every DOE office. Under her leadership, the department operated less like a national security agency and more like a women’s studies department with a budget and a stockpile. The senior ranks were filled with women who owed their positions to Granholm’s patronage. The DEI apparatus was run by women. The culture that treated an accusation from a woman as a conviction, that treated the accused man’s right to be heard as an inconvenience, was built by a woman. Jennifer Granholm. The woman in charge of the American nuclear arsenal — the warheads, the submarines, the laboratories, the sixty thousand people across the country who keep the deterrent alive was more interested in diversity programming than in deterrence. She had one goal: to be Lady Granholm, the progressive icon, the cabinet secretary who transformed DOE into a showcase for the Biden administration’s social agenda. The nuclear mission was an afterthought, something that happened in New Mexico and Tennessee while she was in Washington, hosting equity summits and collecting magazine profiles. Los Alamos Nuclear Power Plant Was No Place for Granholm to Take Bows for Diversity It Had Other Work to Do The nuclear weapons complex — Los Alamos, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Pantex, the Y-12 National Security Complex, and the Savannah River Site — is where the actual work of keeping the country safe gets done. Granholm treated them as props in her personal branding campaign. The scientists, engineers, and technicians who maintain the arsenal need a Secretary of Energy who understands that their work is the most consequential thing the department does. They got a Secretary who understood that their work was the least interesting thing on her calendar. She mandated DEI training for all senior managers. Rose never took it. She mandated diversity plans from every office. Rose sent his back and told his staff to focus on nuclear weapons. Christopher Davis Christopher Davis The order to remove Rose came through Christopher Davis, Granholm’s chief of staff. To understand Davis is to understand the chain of command that destroyed Rose’s career. Davis had no nuclear weapons background. He had no national security credentials. He was a political operative — congressional staff on the House Oversight and Energy and Commerce committees, then the White House Office of Legislative Affairs under Obama, then a series of political roles at DOE under Obama, then a stint at a nonprofit that advised Congress on oversight. When Biden took office, Davis returned to DOE as Granholm’s senior advisor. She promoted him to chief of staff in March 2022. When she announced the promotion, Granholm praised Davis as “smart, kind, and passionate about solving the climate crisis.” Not the nuclear mission. Not deterrence. Not the safety