More than a dozen Department of Energy workers were fired this month at an Eastern Washington nuclear cleanup site, with at least 30 more federal workers taking buyouts, the latest in President Donald Trump and “special government employee” Elon Musk’s quest to slash the federal workforce.
Layoffs at the Hanford site near Richland included safety engineers, environmental scientists and employees who protect workers’ rights, said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, in a news release Friday.
“These reckless firings will slow down critical cleanup work and make workers less safe — trying to run Hanford with a skeleton crew is a recipe for disaster that could have irreversible impacts,” Murray said.
The Hanford site was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce two-thirds of the nation’s plutonium for nuclear weapons, leading to major contamination. Federal employees at the site are responsible for negotiating with regulators to make sure environmental cleanup work is completed and meets federal standards.
Murray told the Tri-City Herald earlier this month that the Hanford office is already understaffed. Spokespersons for Hanford did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
The layoffs were among hundreds of others for Washington’s federal workers over the past week. The Trump administration plans to cut jobs for more than 600 workers at the Bonneville Power Administration, the biggest electricity supplier in the Pacific Northwest, according to Murray’s office. Those impending reductions include electricians, engineers and biologists.
The firings raise concerns about energy costs and the reliability of the grid, Murray said.
And the Trump administration has laid off a handful of employees at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, another Department of Energy entity that conducts research on energy storage and nuclear security.
Before the layoffs Thursday, more than 30 Hanford workers voluntarily stepped down as part of the federal government’s “deferred resignation” program, which offers workers pay through September if they resign, the Tri-City Herald reported. But Murray told the Herald there was no guarantee workers would actually be paid through that time, as funding will be uncertain.
Earlier in the month, Brian Vance, the Department of Energy manager at Hanford, told the Herald he couldn’t speculate how many layoffs were coming. But he said he expected to be able to get the federal funds to continue with cleanup efforts.
Hanford previously had about 300 federal employees at the site overseeing cleanup efforts. The rest of the workers at that site, about 13,000, are contractors.
Musk has promised to lay off large swaths of the federal workforce as part of his “Department of Government Efficiency” in the Trump administration, which purports to reduce wasteful government spending.
As a result, thousands of workers have lost their jobs and several federal agencies have been ordered to stop their work, including health and science institutions and aid organizations.
In a news release Saturday, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, said the Trump administration has fired or plans to fire an estimated 200,000 federal workers, targeting workers who are on a probationary period — hired or promoted within the past year or two — and thus don’t have full civil service protections.
In her statement, Cantwell listed estimates for federal civil servant layoffs that have been reported so far:
- Department of Health and Human Services: 5,200
- Department of Housing and Urban Development: 4,800
- USDA Agricultural Research Service: 800
- USDA Forest Service: 3,400
- Department of the Interior: 2,600
- Department of Energy: 2,000
- Environmental Protection Agency: 1,700 (received warning letters)
- Department of Veterans Affairs: more than 1,000
- Small Business Administration: 720
