Congressional Democrats are sounding the alarm on the impact of sweeping federal job cuts to the resilience of U.S. power grids.
As early as February, about 130 federal workers were fired from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which operates about three quarters of the Pacific Northwest’s power grid.
The following week, some 30 probationary workers were offered their jobs back, similarly to workers who were fired and recalled from jobs at the Department of Agriculture and the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA). But Democratic lawmakers expressed concern that even temporary disruptions in such cases could have an effect.
Another 88 employees have been fired from the Western Area Power Administration, which provides service to 15 states.
In an interview with The Hill, House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) called the cuts at the BPA “another ready shoot, aim, disaster by this reckless Trump administration and the clown car group from DOGE,” referencing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. A DOGE spokesperson has denied the group was involved in the Department of Energy firings.
“They announced cuts and layoffs and then realize that some of what they’ve just done is going to cause the lights to go out for large swaths of America, so they start trying to put the toothpaste back at the tube,” Huffman said.
Even in the case of the firings that were reversed, he added, “it’s a disruption, even if it’s just for a few days, for mission-critical things, and it’s, I’m sure, not going to help with morale or recruitment and retention for these folks that we count on to keep the lights on.”
The BPA operates on the revenues it makes from selling power generated by federally operated dams, Huffman added, so cutting its workforce makes little sense as a way to reduce federal expenditures.
“The idea that you can just abruptly cut people, it’s stupid enough, but the fact that you don’t know that it doesn’t even save the federal treasury any money, makes it even dumber. And that’s what we’re dealing with,” he said.
Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden (D) and Jeff Merkley (D) were also sharply critical of the initial BPA firings, writing in a letter to President Trump, “We do not believe there is an energy emergency, but your actions certainly appear to be creating one through these cuts that actively jeopardize the stability of our energy infrastructure, right now.”
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, has raised similar concerns about the firings at the Western Area Power Administration.
“Combined with Elon’s ‘buyout,’ we could be looking at a 20% reduction in their workforce, crippling the western grid and leading to blackouts and power outages,” Heinrich said in a post on the social platform X, referencing an offer for a voluntary buyout sent to all federal workers.
The White House has said roughly 77,000 workers took the offer as of Feb. 13, representing about 3 percent of the federal government’s civilian workforce. The administration has not specified how many of those employees belonged to different agencies.
Trump declared an “energy emergency” on his first day in office and, along with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, has taken several steps to speed up the permitting processes for fossil fuel development in particular.
But critics of the job cuts have warned new energy production will do little good if the grid is unprepared for the burden of it. In early 2021, the self-contained Electric Reliability Council of Texas went offline during a cold snap that led to at least 246 deaths, the worst blackout in the state’s history. Advocates for more resilient grids have pointed to that storm as a vision of things to come if infrastructure is not better prepared.
In an interview with The Hill, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) noted that American demand for energy is expected to surge, particularly due to the proliferation of data centers, and that any weakening of the grid will significantly complicate that demand growth.
“In the ‘30s, we electrified most of America within about a decade … we are capable of great things, but we did that with a coordinated, publicly-minded federal effort,” he said. “As we now look at a scenario where we need to be deploying similar volumes of capital as we did back then.”
That project, he added, will require agencies involved in the process to understand what the task at hand will require and commit to it.
“Because if we don’t, the impact is, in the first instance, rising costs, in the second instance, blackouts and in the third instance, people deciding that it just isn’t prudent to invest in the United States. None of those are good outcomes, but they’re all possible, given what they’re doing,” he said.
