The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency are now behind us. The last 14 weeks have been a tumult for federal agencies, as the new administration has moved quickly to make good on its promise to massively downsize the federal workforce.
While the Department of Energy and its new secretary, Chris Wright, have largely stayed out of mainstream discourse, a quiet but dramatic transformation has been taking place. By the end of April, thousands of energy scientists, analysts, engineers, and other experts had voluntarily left the federal workforce, thanks to the deferred resignation program that keeps participants who step aside from their roles on the payroll until September. Many others, earlier in the year, were unceremoniously fired.
The loss of these critical roles, and the longer-term impact of these changes on the domestic energy sector, can’t be overstated. It’s not yet clear what will happen to the many projects DOE funds, manages, and advises. But there’s growing concern that nobody with the requisite technical expertise will be around to oversee those that are left intact after Trump’s woodchipper has moved on.
This isn’t just a problem for Biden-era programs that use Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds to nudge new clean energy technologies toward commercialization. It could also be self-defeating for the Trump administration’s own priorities.
The administration includes people like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who are ostensibly interested in grid expansion for artificial intelligence, and who have directly championed nuclear, batteries, and even solar in the past. And the “energy dominance” concept has been a key part of Trump’s approach to his second term in office. But nonetheless, the administration is making political decisions — in DOE and elsewhere — that will make regulation more complicated, and possibly make it hard to build new infrastructure.
As Jigar Shah, who led the DOE’s Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration, said on a February episode of Open Circuit, the contradiction is “the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I don’t understand exactly what world we’re going into,” he added, “but…this is having a chilling effect on the entire business of energy.”
Things are changing by the minute, but here is Latitude Media’s rundown of how the dismantling of DOE has played out in the last few months.
January
On his first day in office, President Trump signed a flurry of executive orders, many of which focused on energy specifically. He instated an “immediate pause” on the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and a 90-day review period for all projects. And he also announced a hiring freeze across the federal government.
Loans, grants, and other programs faced immediate uncertainty regarding payments and timelines. Workers across DOE offices told Latitude Media at the time that they were instructed not to respond to applicants and awardees who contacted them.
A next-day memo from the Office of Management and Budget attempted to bring some much-needed clarity on the funding freeze, explaining that Trump administration priority projects — like oil and gas, critical minerals, and nuclear energy — would move quickly through the review process.
Among the freeze’s many victims were the farmers counting on support from the Rural Energy for America Program, which issues grants for projects aimed at energy efficiency and renewables. The funding chaos prompted at least one organization dedicated to those farmers and rural businesses to furlough much of its staff.
Also on day one, the president declared a national energy emergency, blaming the Biden administration’s “harmful and shortsighted policies” for high energy prices and “inadequate energy supply.” That order instructed agencies to use emergency authority to speed up generation of domestic energy resources, including crude oil, natural gas, coal, biofuels, and geothermal. Wind and solar, however, were not on that list.
February
In February, the administration’s effort to dismantle the federal workforce began in earnest, with the help of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
At least three DOGE staffers were installed at DOE’s headquarters, and sources within the agency confirmed that Secretary Wright granted IT and cybersecurity office access to a 23-year-old DOGE engineer who had previously interned at SpaceX. On February 11, employees said they were instructed to leave the office early, prompting suspicions of an “office raid” by Musk and his team. As one staffer told Latitude Media at the time, “people are afraid of what information [DOGE] have their hands on, and what they might do with it.”
Speaking to Latitude Media on the condition of anonymity, DOE employees across the agency described a “weird, quiet limbo” in the weeks after the inauguration. Instructions to pause work coincided with the implementation of executive orders and memos, and what was seen as an effort by the new administration to dismantle the agency from within.
Then, in mid-February, the mass layoffs that had been making their way around the federal government hit DOE. Over the course of two days, the administration laid off most probationary workers, meaning those who had been in their roles for less than a year.
At the country’s power marketing administrations, where hundreds of power dispatchers, transmission schedulers and planners, field workers, and realtime traders were laid off, the move raised serious reliability issues for large swaths of the country. (The administration quickly walked back those layoffs, and some employees reported being brought back after missing only a day of work.)
But the chaos didn’t stop there. A few days later, a “stop work order” circulated, placing certain contract workers on paid leave. Contract workers who spoke with Latitude Media said there was confusion on exactly where the orders had come from. The email with the instructions came from consulting firms themselves, and not from inside DOE; one contractor said they’d been told the orders came from the White House, and that there were “really no other details shared.”
Around the same time, the agency circulated a memo instructing remote workers that they’d be required to return to office in Washington, D.C., a move seen by many as further attempts to downsize the workforce.
Then, on a Saturday toward the end of February, the White House’s Office of Personnel Management sent out the now-infamous “What did you do last week?” for the first time. Wright initially instructed employees not to respond to the emails, saying DOE would handle things. When a second email went out, though, he backtracked, emailing agency employees and instructing them to respond to the new request.
March
In March, more employees departed — but others returned, as courts ordered the administration to bring back probationary employees who had been fired in February.
DOE was required to submit the first iteration of a “reduction in force” plan to OMB and OPM by March 13. According to a draft of that plan viewed by Latitude Media, some organizations, like the power marketing administrations, were deemed “essential.”
That draft also slated offices like the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, for mass reductions of force — and even eventual closure.
According to that document, by mid-March more than 1,200 employees had already taken the administration up on its offer of deferred resignation. (DOE reopened that program at the end of March, giving employees additional time to accept the offer.)
Another 71 “DEI employees” — meaning those focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts like community engagement — were placed on administrative leave and would be “prioritized” in the implementation of a coming reduction in force. Then, following an order from a district judge in Maryland, DOE said it would resume reimbursements for DEI activities.
However, DOE is still allowing, and seemingly even encouraging, recipients of such grants to voluntarily opt not to undertake equity-related activities.
The following week brought upheaval at the Loan Programs Office — responsible for $400 billion in government funds — when John Sneed, who led the office for a time during the first Trump administration, stepped aside. Sneed was replaced by former ARPA-E director Lane Genatowski.
In late-March, the administration asked DOE to submit a list of all projects funded by the IRA and BIL. Officials ordered the review of programs that had spent less than 45% of their funding, sources said, and the resulting “hit list” would be used to decide which Biden-backed projects would be eliminated.
But the clean energy industry had at least one cause for hope in March. At the end of the month, ARPA-E hosted its annual Innovation Summit, drawing record attendance. Up until just a few weeks before, it wasn’t clear, even to agency employees, whether the event would go ahead as planned. But thanks to eleventh-hour approval, the office gathered nearly 3,000 attendees outside D.C., where Wright applauded the work of the national labs, offered enthusiastic support for nuclear fission, fusion, and energy storage in a speech that appeared to stand up for ARPA-E’s independence.
April
In early April, lawmakers and the private sector rallied to save certain projects from the so-called “hit list.” Representatives on both sides of the aisle pushed back on planned cuts, including to hydrogen hubs; and in a letter to Secretary Wright, Democratic senators asserted that if DOE doesn’t want to spend money on a program Congress has funded, “the lawful response” is to ask Congress to rescind that funding.
Some of these efforts to shore up support for projects appear to be having some success. Thanks to a mad dash behind-the-scenes that involved local lawmakers and business associations, for example, at least one of the OCED-funded direct air capture hubs has been taken off the hit list — at least for now. Meanwhile, inside DOE, the efforts to push federal workers out the door continued. The deferred resignation program deadline was extended to midnight on Friday, April 11, as workers were reminded that major additional cuts were coming. Across the agency, career officials from leadership positions on down decided to step aside.
However, the pressure to push career employees out has been so successful that the Trump-appointed heads of some offices started to get nervous that there wouldn’t be enough staff to keep things running. In at least one office, the director attempted to retain key staff by telling them he would request exemptions from return-to-office requirements. Elsewhere, like at LPO, employees were reminded about the resignation package right up until the deadline, and encouraged to accept it.
The changes to come
100 days in, Trump’s DOE is already a vastly different agency from the one he inherited in late January. At the end of the Biden era, DOE comprised around 16,000 employees. In the plan the agency submitted to OPM and OMB in March, DOE designated around 9,000 workers as “essential,” but didn’t explicitly say those positions would be protected from future cuts. As of late April, nearly 4,000 staffers have reportedly accepted the offered resignation incentives.
But there are likely more changes to come. The second phase of DOE’s reduction in force plan was due in mid-April, and for months now the administration has made it clear that an additional RIF was coming; that threat, many staffers told Latitude Media, was partly why so many people opted to take the deferred resignation.
Last week, the Office of Personnel Management published a proposed rule that would allow the administration to reclassify thousands of the remaining federal workers as something akin to political employees — making them “at will” workers, and therefore easier to fire. That’s a recommendation made in Project 2025 as a tool for destroying the “administrative state.”
Trump has often attempted to put distance between his administration’s priorities and Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint prepared in advance of a potential second term. But at least when it comes to DOE, many of the changes outlined in that document appear to already be in the works.
The document’s chapter on DOE, authored by energy attorney Bernard McNamee, who spent several months leading the agency’s Office of Policy during the first Trump term before being appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, calls for eliminating a slew of offices including ARPA-E, OCED, the Grid Deployment Office, the office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and LPO — all of which have already weathered significant cuts.
McNamee also recommends renaming DOE as “the Department of Energy Security and Advanced Science.” That rebranded agency, he said, should “promote American energy security by ensuring access to abundant, reliable, and affordable energy.”
Exactly how the administration plans to achieve this given the mass exodus of some of its most experienced and technically skilled talent — and without the offices dedicated to renewable energy, the cheapest path to new power — remains to be seen.
