I'm surprised this guy isn't on the short list for a Medal of Freedom.

AP via Houston Chronicle:

Tens of millions of dollars and repeated security reviews haven't stopped embarrassing security breakdowns in the government's nuclear weapons program - and now the man in charge has been sent packing.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman on Thursday ousted the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile and oversees the nation's weapons research laboratories.

"I have decided it is time for new leadership at the NNSA," Bodman said in announcing that the agency's chief, Linton Brooks, would resign within the month.

Brooks, a former ambassador and arms control negotiator, said he accepted the decision, one he understood was "based on the principle of accountability that should govern all public service."

"This is not a decision that I would have preferred," he said in a statement to NNSA employees.

Brooks was reprimanded in June for failing to report to Bodman the theft of computer files at an NNSA facility in Albuquerque, N.M., that contained Social Security numbers and other data for 1,500 workers.

Then in October hundreds of pages of classified weapons-related documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico were found during a drug raid in the home of a woman who had worked at the lab.

That security breakdown was especially troubling, a department inspector general's report said, because it came after tens of millions of dollars had been spent to upgrade cyber-security at Los Alamos. A new management group also had been put in charge only a few months earlier - also a fallout over the repeated security problems.

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