The US administration of President Donald Trump undertaking staff cuts at federal organisations including the Department of Energy (DOE) and its institutions. The cuts are being driven by multiple initiatives, including Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and executive orders. Senator Patty Murray said DOE has to date laid off 1,800 employees, which amounts to approximately 11% of its national workforce. Murray is Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair and a member of the Subcommittee on Energy & Water Development.
The DOE Hanford nuclear site in Washington state now has had almost 50 of its 300 staff members laid off with more cuts expected. Hanford is home to 177 underground waste storage tanks – a legacy of nuclear weapons development and nuclear energy research during World War II and Cold War.
The staff reduction represents about 16% of DOE’s Hanford workforce, which was 78% staffed when the layoffs were announced. Those leaving federal service include workers picked for layoffs who were still in probationary status (which can last for a year or more after being hired or promoted) and also people who volunteered for layoffs in what the federal government designated “delayed resignations”.
Brian Vance, the DOE Hanford site manager told a Tri-City Regional Chamber of Commerce that most of those who volunteered after promises of pay through September are retiring from the federal government. “I don’t think we are at the end,” he noted referring to plans to move forward with a smaller staff. The US Office of Management & Budget and US Office of Personnel Management have told federal agencies to prepare to initiate large-scale reductions in force. Agency heads were given a deadline of 13 March to develop reduction-in-force and reorganisation plans.
The memo said the federal government is “costly, inefficient and deeply in debt” and that “tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programmes that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens”. The memo offered suggestions such as renegotiating provisions of collective bargaining agreements and eliminating functions not mandated by law, as well as firing underperforming employees and reducing staff through attrition. It added that no more than one employee should be hired for every four who leave federal jobs.
At the Hanford site most work is contracted out. Hanford previously had about 300 federal employees at the site overseeing cleanup efforts. The other 13,000 were contractors. The memo said that agencies should “maximally reduce the use of outside consultants and contractors”. Hanford’s DOE workers are responsible for negotiating with regulators to agree on the environmental cleanup work that must be done, the standards that must be met and the schedule for completing work. They oversee contractor work to ensure that it meets the extensive regulatory requirements set by state and federal governments.
The memo emphasised that the focus should be on eliminating work that is not legally required “while driving the highest quality, most efficient delivery of their statutorily required functions”.
The environmental cleanup work at the Hanford site currently employees about 13,000 people, mostly contractors and subcontractors. Hanford, as an enterprise with multiple private contractors, is the largest employer in the Tri-Cities.
About $70bn has so far been spent on the cleanup effort, including to protect the Columbia River that flows through the site, with another 60 years of work expected to complete cleanup. Vance said the remaining DOE staff will need to refocus on the mission of environmental cleanup at Hanford, and that may mean not supporting some projects it has in the past, such as clean energy initiatives.
The DOE leadership team will “evaluate critical functions and make sure that we are adjusting our staffing to support those critical functions,” Vance said. “And then we’re really going to continue to work with our contractor partners to look for opportunities we can partner even more to mitigate those losses (of federal employees.)” The Hanford site will remain safe and secure, he said. The federal team at Hanford needs to be sufficiently staffed to enable the contractor workforce to do their jobs, he added.
Some of the less radioactive waste in ageing leak-prone underground tanks could be turned into a stable glass this year for permanent disposal. Construction on Hanford’s vitrification plant began in 2002, with construction and commissioning almost complete for vitrification of low activity radioactive waste. Construction is continuing on the section of the plant intended to treat high level radioactive waste.
DOE is also ready to start moving 1,936 capsules holding highly radioactive caesium and strontium from underwater storage in a pool in the ageing Waste Encapsulation & Storage Facility to safer dry storage. DOE plans to move the first capsule of caesium this year.
