Following mass layoffs that impacted as many as 2,000 probationary employees at the Department of Energy (DOE) last week, the agency continues to face downsizing efforts, Latitude Media has learned.
Those efforts include a “stop work order” that places certain contract workers — including at least 18 assigned to the Loan Programs Office — on unpaid leave, as well as a notice that staff at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will be required to return to office in Golden, Colorado.
The latter was conveyed to employees by Principal Deputy Undersecretary for Science and Innovation Derek Passarelli, on a call with some 500 attendees, including those from other DOE offices who work on projects with EERE.
On January 20, the Trump administration passed an executive order ordering the heads of departments and agencies to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements.” However, there has not yet been an official DOE-wide return-to-office order. One attendee of the Passarelli call characterized it as a “heads up” that the order is coming — and that once that official word goes out, employees will have 30 days to get to Colorado.
That announcement, they added, caused “quite a bit of concern,” and is seen by employees as further efforts to “right-size” the agency. The Golden Field Office shares an address with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
EERE encompasses a huge swath of DOE’s clean energy work. Its sub-offices include the Vehicle Technologies Office, the Solar Energy Technologies Office, the Geothermal Technologies Office, and the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office.
Meanwhile, contract workers from at least two consulting firms — RER Solutions and JLL — received an email notification of a stop work order Tuesday evening. They were instructed not to come into the office on Wednesday, and informed they were being placed on unpaid leave, effective immediately.
DOE employs around 95,000 contract workers at any given time — which far outnumbers its 14,000 federal employees — across dozens of offices nationwide. It’s unclear whether work was stopped across the whole agency, or just in certain offices.
The order has caused confusion among the workers Latitude Media spoke with, who weren’t clear on exactly where the instructions had come from. The email with the order came directly from the consulting firms themselves, and not from DOE. One contractor said they’d been told the orders came from the White House, and that there were “really no other details shared.”
DOE didn’t immediately respond to Latitude Media’s request for comment Thursday.
This week’s downsizing efforts follow a week of chaos at the agency.
Mass layoffs also impacted hundreds of workers from national power marketing administrations, which fall under DOE’s purview. That included power dispatchers, transmission schedules and planners, field workers, and traders at the Bonneville Power Administration, a self-funded entity that controls more than 75% of high-voltage transmission lines in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the flow of electricity from 31 federal dams and one nuclear power plant. Those layoffs, Public Power Council executive director Scott Simms said, are increasing the risk of reliability problems in the region.
The Trump administration later reversed the firings of 30 BPA employees, whose roles were deemed critical.
