The Trump administration’s layoff spree at the Department of Energy is now hitting federal workers who keep the power grids running, posing serious reliability issues for large swaths of the country.
Power dispatchers, transmission schedulers and planners, field workers, and realtime traders have been laid off from the nation’s power marketing administrations — federal agencies that market and transmit wholesale electricity.
The layoffs included hundreds of workers at the Bonneville Power Administration, a self-funded entity in the Pacific Northwest that controls more than 75% of the region’s high-voltage transmission lines, as well as the flow of electricity from 31 federal dams and one nuclear power plant.
As many as 200 workers were laid off at Bonneville yesterday, on top of those who had taken the administration up on its buyout offer, explained Scott Simms, who leads the Public Power Council, which represents consumer-owned utilities in the region including Bonneville.
Ninety open positions have been frozen, he added. That move included rescinding offers, in some cases from applicants who had already submitted their resignations to their current positions. Combined with early retirements in the pipeline, BPA is poised to lose around 20% of its workforce.
“We’re seeing an environment in which the risk for a reliability event is increasing,” Simms said. For the region served by Bonneville, which is currently facing critical weather conditions and sub-zero temperatures, grid reliability concerns are “front and center,” he added.
Simms said his organization has not heard back from DOE regarding their concerns, but that Bonneville is already moving into what it calls “the sustain program.” That contingency plan involves “retrenching” to focus only on the assets and customers they currently have. Projects related to things like policy initiatives or new interconnections, he said, are all on hold.
Layoff chaos
In the early days of Trump’s second term, Bonneville’s posture was essentially an attempt to “keep our heads down,” one employee, who was laid off yesterday, told Latitude Media.
When the first executive order freezing federal funding came down, BPA’s grants were frozen for several days. “Everyone was freaking out…but two days later we were allowed to go back into contracts, which were operating normally, and we could even issue new contracts.” The message from upper management, they added, was “we’re a functioning utility, we need to do this to be able to operate the grid.”
In a Wednesday quarterly meeting, BPA head John Harrison struck an optimistic tone, in part because it was widely understood that the utility was already understaffed.
“Everyone thought Bonneville was going to be safe,” said one employee for whom that was the first such quarterly meeting. But by late afternoon, rumors were swirling in group chats and on Reddit threads. At 6pm, that employee, who worked in BPA’s energy efficiency department, received an email from their manager. At 8pm, they received notice of their layoff via an email from OMB stating their role “was no longer in the interest of the public.”
Keeping the lights on at Bonneville
In a letter addressed to Chris Wright yesterday and reviewed by Latitude Media, Public Power Council and other groups representing PMA customers emphasized the “crucial role in overseeing high-voltage transmission infrastructure that enables energy growth and resilience” that PMA workers play.
“We urge DOE to recognize PMA employees as essential contributors to the administration’s energy vision,” the letter said. And, it added, “it is important to note that PMA employees and the work they do is funded by ratepayers through their respective utility customers, not U.S. taxpayers.”
Two former BPA heads also addressed a letter to Wright yesterday, expressing “deep concern” over the layoffs. “We understand and encourage efforts to increase efficiency,” they wrote. “But the manner in which efficiency is pursued can have real world and near-term impacts on the people who live in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada.”
The fact that the impact of BPA’s workforce reduction is so widespread is particularly concerning, they continued, because it has impacted operations personnel tasked with “assuring generation input and service to load is balanced across large parts of the Northwest.” Those positions are literally responsible for keeping the lights on, the letter concluded.
Randy Hardy, one former BPA official who co-authored the letter, told Latitude Media he expects grid reliability in Bonneville’s territory to experience a significant decline.
“BPA typically operates a system where your unplanned outage rate is well under 1%,” Hardy said. “That percentage is now going to go up dramatically. I’d say it’s probably in the 10 to 20% range, right? Those are Russian Roulette odds.”
The irony of the Bonneville layoffs in particular, he added, is that they won’t result in any savings, because unlike other PMAs, Bonneville is set up with a “revolving fund,” meaning ratepayer money flows directly to BPA, rather than through Treasury.
“It is clear that these impacts are all top down from the Trump-Musk team,” Hardy said. “It’s clear that the President and Musk have no idea of what the impacts are on Bonneville, and frankly, they don’t care.” The Department of Energy didn’t immediately respond to Latitude Media’s request for comment.
