In the 12 weeks since President Trump took office, the Department of Energy has been in a state of flux.
First came instructions to pause work while the administration implemented changes such as a 90-day “review” of actions related to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Then in mid-February, mass layoffs of most of DOE’s probationary employees rocked the agency — though just a month later a court order brought them back, at least for now. In the intervening weeks, DOE issued a stop work order that placed certain contract workers on unpaid leave.
Throughout it all, the Trump administration has made it clear that major additional DOE cuts were coming. In March, the agency submitted a report to the Office of Management and Budget, outlining its downsizing steps. According to a draft of that report viewed by Latitude Media, by mid-March more than 1,200 employees had already taken the Department of Government Efficiency up on its “deferred resignation program,” which allowed employees who resigned to receive pay and benefits until the end of September.
That offer was reopened this month — and this time around, it looks like scores of career staffers have taken it. Employees across agency offices, speaking to Latitude Media on the condition of anonymity, have described the last few weeks at DOE as being “demoralizing,” “sad,” and like “a hostile takeover.” Many said they felt there had been a pressure campaign to convince staff to take a second round of deferred resignation offers, including regular reminders that return-to-office requirements and additional layoffs were imminent. One oft-cited refrain was that DOGE promised to “keep cutting ‘til the screaming starts.”
However, the pressure has been so successful that some Trump DOE appointees have gotten nervous that there won’t be enough staff to keep operations 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.
Career staff had until midnight on Friday to accept the DOGE resignation offer. And DOE is expected to submit an updated report to OMB sometime today. With it, the next era of DOE will begin to take shape.
The vulnerable offices
Certain areas of focus, and certain projects, are more vulnerable than others. In its first report to OMB, DOE defined roughly 9,000 of the current 16,000 workers (including those who took the first round resignation offer), “essential for purposes of exclusion from large-scale RIFs.” But the parts of DOE focused on renewables — which globally made up over 90% of the energy added to the grid in 2024, at 585 gigawatts of capacity additions — appeared nowhere on that list.
The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act appropriated billions in funding for the clean energy sector, much of which DOE has been in charge of channeling. That influx prompted several years of escalating energy and activity within the agency: more hiring, more loans, more projects.
But in 2025, that energy has dissipated, one employee told Latitude Media last week, “like the wind has been taken out of the room.”
Loan Programs Office
The Loan Programs Office, which saw its influence and power grow substantially under the Biden administration, has been very hard-hit by deferred resignations, Latitude has learned.
On Friday LPO employees said at least half of the office’s federal workforce — around a hundred staffers — had opted to take the offer. That came after a last-minute meeting in which the LPO director reminded staff about the looming midnight deadline, and encouraged them to accept the resignation package, according to people inside the office.
The resignations cap off a brutal three months for the office. The future of LPO has been marked by uncertainty since President Trump took office in January. After two months on the job, Trump’s original LPO director John Sneed left the office; his replacement Lane Genatowski served as the director of the Advanced Research Programs Agency for Energy under the first Trump administration.
Loan recipients have largely been left in limbo, though some have seen their funds unfrozen, including a $1.5 billion loan to restart the Palisades nuclear plant, and a $1.4 billion loan to Calumet for a sustainable aviation fuel project.
Other major loan recipients haven’t had the same success, and the impacts of the freeze are already being felt: Kore Power scrapped its plans for a battery plant in Arizona. Aspen Aerogels canceled both its LPO loan and its planned factory in Georgia, and said it will expand its capacity in China. And late last month, PG&E told California regulators that its own $15 billion LPO loan was facing “substantial uncertainty.” To mitigate that uncertainty, the utility is now seeking a higher rate of return for 2026.
Grid Deployment Office
The Grid Deployment Office, established in 2022, is tasked with modernizing and upgrading the U.S. electrical grid, including enhancing reliability and resilience, and developing new and improved infrastructure. As of Friday evening, around half of the office had resigned, according to one employee, with the deadline to accept the DRP still open into the night.
For many career staff, the decision to take the DRP last week wasn’t because of the looming layoffs or the return-to-office requirements, one employee said. Instead, it stemmed from the fact that in the first week of April “pretty much our entire leadership team of career folks all announced their resignations or retired.” So with no career officials “steering the ship” or interfacing between employees and political appointees, many employees decided to leave.
The reasons GDO leadership gave their staff for their departures varied. Some mentioned orders from DOE leadership, like firing probationary workers, that they felt uncomfortable with. Some were worried they’d be fired and lose their pensions, or else refused to relocate to D.C. with no guarantee of job stability.
Still others pointed to a fundamental inability to carry out the mission of the office; not only were grant funds stuck, but communication with applicants and awardees was essentially restricted to acknowledging receipt of emails. (That was a big deal for GDO in particular, one employee said, because in 2023, around a third of correspondence to DOE came through GDO alone.)
But the “nail in the coffin,” the employee said, was a department-wide meeting in the first week of April, in which Trump’s GDO director simultaneously tried to convince staff to stay, and acknowledged that he had “no power over the staffing or cuts to the programs.” The only thing he could offer, the employee said, was that DOGE “really liked” GDO’s Transmission Facilitation Program — a $2.5 billion effort to build new transmission projects.
Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations
The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which manages more than $20 billion in clean energy investments, has long been on the Trump administration’s target list. Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation, calls for the office to be shut down. The document claims that OCED is “distorting energy markets” and forcing taxpayers to cover “the risk of new technology deployment.”
In March, it became clear that the administration was already heeding those calls. Several of OCED’s largest projects, including some of the hydrogen and direct air capture hubs as well as long duration energy storage demonstrations, made it onto DOE’s project “hit list.” And documents shared with Latitude Media show that the administration has proposed cutting OCED’s more than 250 person staff down to a temporary staff of 35.
One OCED employee told Latitude Media that the staff believes that the office’s new director Cathy Tripodi, who worked in various DOE offices in the first Trump administration, was essentially brought on to shut the office down entirely. OCED’s nuclear technologies program will likely be transferred to the Office of Nuclear Energy; the ultimate fate of the office’s other projects remains unclear.
However, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is already pushing back against some of the planned cuts, and the stakeholders for projects like the DAC hubs are working furiously behind-the-scenes to shore up support.
Even if the projects can be saved, however, there might not be many people around to run them on the OCED side. “Our fear is they will just shut things down because…there are no bodies to manage this,” one employee said. “These projects, even if we try to save them, they’re going to falter, because so much of the office…is gone.”
Elsewhere at the agency
The DOE offices that deal directly with funding clean energy technologies appear to be particularly vulnerable to a Trump administration vindictive to the sector. However, other parts of the administration are also in limbo.
Across the whole department, the jobs of those who work in diversity, equity, and inclusion-related initiatives are especially at risk. According to the draft of the March AARP Phase 1 report viewed by Latitude Media, 71 employees who worked in DEI were placed on administrative leave and would be “prioritized in RIF implementation.”
These initiatives include things like stakeholder engagement and workforce development in underserved communities, which were on pause for nearly two months after DOE issued “stop work” orders in an attempt to influence executive orders that President Trump signed on his first day in office. Those directives targeted what the administration branded “illegal DEI” efforts — and were eventually rescinded after a federal district court in Maryland issued a temporary injunction in late February. However, those weeks of respite for the employees dedicated to efforts like community benefit plans and the Biden-era Justice40 requirements are likely at an end.
Meanwhile, ARPA-E, the office’s research arm, has been given mixed signals. On the one hand, Project 2025, the conservative blueprint from the Heritage Foundation, calls for eliminating it altogether. But at its recent Energy Innovation Summit, Wright had the headline speaking slot, and used it to applaud the work of both ARPA-E and of the national labs. He emphasized the potential of nuclear fission, fusion, and energy storage.
As for the parts of DOE that are less at risk? According to the Phase 1 report draft seen by Latitude Media, all four federal power marketing administrations are together looking at reductions of no more than 10%, and potentially less.
Of the total 5,176 positions across the four administrations, 4,650 of them are categorized as “essential.” Just a few months ago, though, they too were hit by layoffs — which were largely reversed when it became clear that the absences could cause major problems for the country’s energy supply.
