The cost of free speech

Larry Criscione has it pretty good by most people’s standards. He’s a nuclear engineer who paid off his house many years ago. The Springfield resident owns 17 rental properties in the area and, at the age of 57, recently took an early retirement pension package from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at $3,350 a month. That will allow him to spend a lot more time with a family that includes nine grandchildren, after a career that often required him to be away from home months at a time.

Criscione, though, is angry. Angry at essentially being forced out of his job as an operations engineer at the NRC, which has a regional office in Naperville. Angry that a social media post, in which he referred to a top NRC official as “spineless,” was used as justification to begin a termination process. Angry that, included in his initial notice of potential termination, other incidents from his long career in nuclear power were dragged into the picture.

“Most humans cannot stand hypocrisy,” said Criscione, always twisting a napkin into a skinny rope as he talked. “But they also have this self-preservation instinct where they’re not going to yell at the king if he has no clothes. Whereas, I’ve always been willing to point it out.”

As many federal government employees in the second administration of President Donald Trump have learned, critics can be subject to harsh reprisal despite what the law says are First Amendment rights. On Sept. 30, while on furlough due to the government shutdown that officially began the next day, Criscione opened this email from the NRC:

“President Trump opposes a government shutdown and strongly supports enactment of a House-passed continuing resolution that would keep agencies funded through Nov. 21. Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this continuing resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands,” the email said. “If Congressional Democrats maintain their current posture and refuse to pass a clean continuing resolution to keep the government funded before midnight on September 30, 2025, federal appropriated funding will lapse.”

The NRC’s email to its roughly 8,800 employees had the name of associate director Jody Martin attached, and Criscione took to his personal LinkedIn account later that day.

“What kind of a man looks the other way as laws are disregarded? What kind of a man does what they know to be wrong?” Criscione wrote. “What kind of a system allows such a man to rise to the upper levels of ‘leadership’ at a vital federal regulatory agency? The framers of the Constitution predicted Trump. And they predicted Jody Martin and the rest of the spineless bureaucrats who do his bidding.”

On Nov. 3, Martin’s colleague at the NRC, deputy executive director of operations Sabrina Atack, had a conference call with Criscione. She would be recommending that he be terminated for his comments and cited other incidents in his employee file that, despite being cleared of any wrongdoing, she nonetheless thought were germane to the situation.

“Your comments regarding NRC senior leadership were unbecoming and disruptive because they subjected Mr. Martin to public ridicule and targeted him for public harassment,” Atack wrote in a memorandum to Criscione. “Moreover, your unauthorized postings fostered a disruptive working environment within the NRC, with the potential for inciting fear and violence towards NRC leadership, thereby undermining NRC supervisory authority.”

Criscione, through a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that nothing in his LinkedIn post, nor anything else in his HR file, had broken any First Amendment rights of federal employees. There was no public disclosure of any information that shouldn’t have been made public. When confronted with the FOIA findings, the NRC quickly offered an enhanced early retirement package instead of a firing. In agreeing to the deal, Criscione gave up his right to sue the NRC, but not the right to talk about it.

“When you’re a person like me, the cards are stacked against you.  They’ve got the whole treasury of the U.S. government to pay attorneys and fight me. And I’ve got NGOs or I’ve got to fund this out of my own pocket,” Criscione, a U.S. Navy veteran, said. “In terms of calling the guy spineless on LinkedIn, I used to do that all the time on agency-wide emails. But I was a union steward. It was my job to point out when they were being hypocrites. With this LinkedIn post, I was a citizen expressing my disgust in a public forum on the partisan email that I got. They’re making all these agencies partisan. They are not supposed to be.”

Criscione said he was threatened with prison time by the federal government over a situation when, while working at the Callaway nuclear plant in Kansas in the early 2000s, he alerted members of Congress to potential flooding and safety issues there – the kind that happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011. Criscione said someone in Congress then leaked his concerns to The Huffington Post. 

That caused a firestorm, with Criscione being threatened with charges of computer fraud. It was a weak case, which is why the office of the Inspector General declined to press charges. But, Criscione said, he was left to twist in the wind for more than a year, unsure if he’d be indicted any day. He eventually won a $550,000 settlement from Callaway, but moved on to more of an office job at the NRC in Maryland.

“I had a target on my back, not because my boss didn’t like me, but because upper management hated me. I would call them out as liars all the time for violating the union contract. I don’t call people out like on the playground. I give the facts,” Criscione said. “I talked to 30 scientists who had real concerns with the flooding. They envisioned the Fukushima accident before it even happened at Fukushima. There was no reason why this had to be kept from the public. It was just me transparently sharing with the public what’s going on.”

In response to an interview request from IT, an NRC spokesperson wrote, “It would be inappropriate for the agency to discuss personnel issues.”

Attorney Tom Pavlik of Delano Law Offices in Springfield, which has expertise in employment law, said his firm is seeing more employers implement strict social media policies. Social media can be dangerous, he said, for anyone employed in private industry, noting that many people nationwide were fired for their social media comments about the recent murder of political activist Charlie Kirk.

“Frankly, the biggest misconception is that far too many people incorrectly think the First Amendment applies to private citizens,” Pavlik said. “It restricts the government from disciplining workers, not private employers – and even then, those protections are still not absolute.” 

While not working for Criscione in any capacity, Pavlik offered some analysis of his situation.

“(It) centers on whether he was speaking as a private citizen, if it was a legitimate issue of public concern, and did it disrupt the workplace or interfere with his workplace duties?” Pavlik said.

Criscione said, “I got in trouble because the No. 2 person in the agency didn’t like me sharing an email with a coworker’s name on it on a LinkedIn post. I don’t think that’s any way to be stewards of the public trust.”

What will Criscione do moving forward? Other than being a husband, father, granddad and landlord, he’s not sure. But one thing already seems assured: Larry Criscione won’t go quietly into the night. 

This article appears in December 18-24, 2025.