The U.S. Department of Energy picked roughly 400 people to lay off at the Bonneville Power Administration, which masterminds how 28% of the Pacific Northwest’s electricity is distributed to homes, businesses and industry.
How did the Department of Energy choose which employees to terminate, and how will the 13% cut affect the BPA? It’s all a big secret.
The feds in the Northwest are not allowed to talk about which types of employees lost their jobs. The feds in Washington, D.C., won’t say anything about the BPA layoffs. Not even to Washington’s congressional delegation.Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, is frustrated.“They are creating complete chaos across many regions and are not being responsive to Congress,” Murray said at a virtual press conference Wednesday.Also at Wednesday’s press conference, laid-off BPA maintenance and program analyst Katie Emerson said her supervisor told her after 5 p.m. Feb. 13 that she would learn later that evening if she would be laid off. She learned that she would be terminated about 8 p.m. that evening.“It’s been awful. It was blindsiding. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster,” she said.Emerson’s former job coordinated support for crews maintaining and fixing power lines.”I supported the people who kept the lights on,” she said. She did not have a backup person for her slot. Emerson has worked for the BPA for 11 years, but has spent only 10 months of the one-year probationary period for her last posting. The Trump administration targeted probationary employees, which included Emerson. She received high marks on her performance reviews. The BPA’s office in Vancouver when contacted last week said it could not talk with the press about the layoffs and passed Cascade PBS’ questions to the U.S. Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The DOE is in charge of the BPA and similar agencies across the nation. Cascade PBS also sent questions directly to the DOE, which did not reply to either set of Cascade PBS questions.Another big unanswered question: Why lay off 400 of the BPA’s roughly 3,100 employees? Consumers of the BPA’s electricity pay their salaries, not the federal government, so the Trump administration is not trimming the federal budget with these layoffs.“Northwest ratepayers ensure that BPA is able to remain self-funded. The Bonneville Power Administration does not receive funding from taxpayers,” said a Feb. 19 letter from Washington’s two senators and seven of its 10 representatives to new Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Democratic U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in WA-3 and Republican U.S. representatives Dan Newhouse, WA-4, and Mike Baumgartner, WA-5, did not sign the letter.Despite not signing, Newhouse and Gluesenkamp Perez told Cascade PBS they have concerns over the Department of Energy’s layoff processes.“There should be a more nuanced approach to terminations and furloughs. I have concerns that the unintended consequences of these workforce reductions will have long-lasting implications at Hanford … and BPA,” Newhouse said in an email to Cascade PBS. Gluesenkamp Perez said the broad cut without any study is a poor approach. “Good policy comes from boots on the ground and a strategy built for long-term value, not an election cycle,” she said in an email.Baumgartner’s press office did not reply to Cascade PBS’s request for comment.The congressional delegation’s Feb 19 letter asked Wright for a reply by Tuesday. On Wednesday, Murray said Wright has not replied yet.Meanwhile, energy experts question why the cuts at Bonneville Power Administration were needed at all. “These reductions are ridiculous because Bonneville is self-funding. … So the whole point of this [reduction] is irrelevant,” said Randy Hardy, former administrator of the BPA. Emerson, the laid-off worker, agreed. “The termination of any BPA employee does not save taxpayers a dollar.” In fact, the 87-year-old BPA sends any surplus revenue money to the federal government, said Scott Simms, executive director of the Public Power Council, an association of consumer-owned utilities serving the Columbia River Basin.Simms acknowledged that this scenario is likely: People in Washington, D.C., who are unfamiliar with the BPA’s organization and the Northwest’s power picture arbitrarily cut a major chunk of the BPA’s 3,100-person workforce without studying precisely what could be safely trimmed without harming the electrical and environmental needs of residents of six states, including the federal and state legal obligations. “It’s clear that the administration has no knowledge of the impacts on Bonneville. “They are being fired on a whim because two billionaires don’t have a clue about what they are doing, and don’t care to learn,” Murray said. The BPA coordinates electricity accumulated from 31 dams in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Wyoming — plus the Columbia Generating Station reactor north of Richland. It sells and transfers that power through this region, and also to states outside its coverage area. It serves 13 million people and maintains more than 15,000 miles of power lines over rivers, streams, mountains, ridges, valleys and plains, which makes up about 75% of the power transmission capability in the Northwest — all while dealing with environmental issues, the flow of the Columbia River and its tributaries, snowpacks and salmon recovery, including getting the fish past the dams.Work across the BPA is specialized and complicated. Line maintenance workers. Power dispatchers. Power traders tackling short-term and long-term contracts. Coordinators with numerous agencies and interests. Engineers. Biologists. Analysts, Administrators. Planners. All working in shifts 24/7.“You cannot apply simplification [in lay-offs] to something this complex,” Hardy said.The BPA is currently short on power dispatchers, who need at least 20 years of experience elsewhere in the agency before dispatching electricity through a complex grid, where the conditions can change second by second, Hardy said. “You don’t hire someone off the street to be a power dispatcher,” he said.Simms and Hardy are also concerned about a shortage of line maintenance workers, the people who go out in bad weather to fix power lines. Hardy said the shortage in maintenance workers could stretch a two-hour unplanned outage to two days. He said the BPA has lost almost all its line crew in Kalispell, Montana, which means workers from Spokane will have to drive over to take care of power outages in that area.Another worry is that the BPA will have to expand its power sources and transmission lines because the Northwest’s population is growing. Also, more power-sucking data centers will be needed to deal with the expansion of the artificial intelligence industry. Trimming planners and analysts will delay those needed expansions, Simms and Hardy said The feds reinstated roughly 30 of the 400 laid-off BPA workers after realizing they had eliminated too many with hard-to-replace skills, according to the BPA. Trump’s executive order “also calls for further large-scale Reductions in Force (RIFs). There may also be further firings of probational employees. Additionally, the [order] requires the hiring of ‘no more than one employee for every four employees that depart.’ BPA cannot afford to follow through on such directives,” said the congressional members’ Feb. 19 letter. The Trump administration has especially targeted probationary employees. Those aren’t just entry-level workers. They include employees who are promoted to supervisory positions. Highly experienced workers who join the BPA after working in other jobs are also classified as probationary. Therefore, a mass termination of probationary employees could also cut experienced workers, Simms noted.“There’s a non-existence of morale at this point,” Emerson said.Meanwhile, about a dozen of the DOE’s roughly 300 employees at the Hanford nuclear reservation have also been laid off. Again, the DOE’s Hanford headquarters referred questions to the DOE’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., which did not reply to Cascade PBS’s request for information. Located north of Richland, the 580-square-mile Hanford site is a huge collection of dead plutonium-producing reactors, massive underground tanks filled with radioactive wastes, closed contaminated chemical processing plants and numerous other sources of radioactive and chemical contamination. It is arguably the most radioactive spot in the Western Hemisphere. The DOE employees there supervise about 10,000 contracted workers who are still a few decades away from cleaning up Hanford to federal and state standards. Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint published in 2023 by The Heritage Foundation. While during the 2024 presidential campaign Trump denied being influenced by it, his tidal wave of executive orders that have swamped the country over the past month follows the Project 2025 plan. Additionally, many of the report’s authors served in the president’s first administration.Without offering any details, Project 2025 described the Washington Department of Ecology and its legal cleanup agreements with the DOE as slowing the federal government’s cleanup of Hanford. The document proposed reclassifying the nuclear waste as less hazardous to expedite the cleanup. In fact, the state’s legal pressure has pushed a foot-dragging DOE to keep to the cleanup schedule and environmental remediation standards. So far, the Trump administration has not issued any executive orders pertaining to Hanford’s cleanup.
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