Chaos over the Trump administration’s firing of federal government workers has even permeated a little-known agency at the center of the Pacific Northwest’s largest source of electricity.
This is already a challenging time for the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets power from Columbia Basin hydropower dams to utilities responsible for powering homes, apartment buildings, businesses, schools and hospitals.
Energy demand is skyrocketing. Utilities are scrambling to transition away from fossil fuels and climate change is altering every aspect of the equation.
And now the Trump administration has forced hundreds of people out at Bonneville, thrusting the hydropower giant into a rut of uncertainty.
Blackouts and rate increases are now on the table, insiders say. Major transmission projects could take twice as long to finish, throwing a wrench into the region’s plans to transition toward renewable energy.
And the specter of even more layoffs, firings and retirements looms large.
“This whole exercise would be ludicrous if it weren’t so serious,” said Randy Hardy, who headed BPA in the 1990s. “Cuts to this kind of thing plays with fire.”
Bonneville supplies about a third of the Pacific Northwest’s electricity, Hardy said, selling the power from dozens of federally operated dams across the region. Generally the administration employs more than 3,000 people including line workers, power dispatchers and engineers.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Bonneville has lost about 14% of its workforce in a round of firings and slew of retirements, Hardy said.
A hiring freeze across the federal government forced the administration to rescind about 90 job offers meant to backfill empty positions. Another 130 probationary employees (which can include recently promoted workers) were fired and more than 200 others decided to retire, including those swayed by the now-infamous “fork in the road” payout offers.
Apparently many of those firings were indiscriminate and poorly planned, Hardy said, because federal officials had to offer jobs back to about 30 employees that had been fired.
Officials with the Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment but have said publicly that the ongoing firings are meant to save money and reduce the federal deficit.
That won’t work here.
Bonneville is entirely self funded, operating entirely on the money it raises from selling electricity, said Kurt Miller, who worked there as an economist and analyst in the 1990s.
“This isn’t going to save the federal government a penny,” said Miller, who is now executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association.
What it does do, is increase the risk profile for the entire agency, Hardy said.
And with the electrical grid the potential for disaster can be high.
Think of the blackout of 1996, Hardy said, when a transmission line failure led to 13 turbines failing at the McNary Dam north of Portland, triggering blackouts all the way into Southern California.
Some 8 million people lost power.
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Hardy said.
A stressed and overworked staff can make mistakes. And in cases like that, energy dispatchers might not even recognize there’s a problem until it’s too late, Hardy said.
On a given day, the probability of an unplanned outage is perhaps a tenth of a percentage point, Hardy said. But stretching Bonneville’s workforce thinner, that probability just rose several percentage points.
“Which is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.
Bonneville representatives declined to comment.
The region already saw two widespread outages this winter. A bomb cyclone in November left some half a million without electricity and high winds in late February knocked out power for more than 150,000. Utilities scrambled to keep up with repairs. Cracks are beginning to show in the Pacific Northwest’s electrical grid.
Plus climate change is warming our atmosphere. Increasingly winter snow instead falls as rain, troubling the region’s historically reliable hydropower plants. Warmer seasons also mean an increased electrical demand for utilities.
This is already a tumultuous time for Bonneville and other utilities, Miller said. Layoffs and mass retirements can only worsen the conditions.
Stressed, demoralized and inexperienced staff members remaining could make ill-informed business decisions, Miller added, which could result in higher costs for utilities and ratepayers.
Cuts at Bonneville sparked immediate pushback across the region. All but one of Washington’s Democratic congressional delegation wrote an open letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, expressing their “grave concerns.”
Only the names of U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, of Washougal, and the two Republican representatives, Dan Newhouse and Michael Baumgartner, were missing from that letter.
Newhouse, however, published a statement of his own, calling for a more nuanced approach to terminations and furloughs. He expressed concerns for the unintended consequences the region would see at the Hanford nuclear site, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories and Bonneville.
“While I agree that the federal workforce and related spending needs to be reduced, we must ensure that positions critical to public safety, energy, and research should be maintained,” Newhouse said in a statement.
The Central Washington Republican has been one of the few willing to push back against Trump. He also voted to impeach the president after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Before Trump took office, Gluesenkamp Perez and Newhouse jointly introduced a bill to support staff recruitment and retention at Bonneville.
Representatives for Baumgartner did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did representatives for any other Republican members of Congress throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Staff reductions at Bonneville have long-lasting implications as well. Delays for transmission projects are all but inevitable, Hardy said.
Washington law requires utilities to be carbon free by 2045. But the grid isn’t replacing coal and natural gas plants with renewables and battery storage fast enough and the energy demand is expected to double by 2050, made worse by the explosion of power-hungry data centers across the West.
New wind and solar farms are only part of the battle, though. Without major transmission upgrades, there will be no way to transport that new electricity to customers.
Bonneville is handling many of those transmission upgrades that cost billions of dollars.
The wait time for these types of projects generally sits around five years, Hardy said. Now he expects the lag to double, hampering economic development in the region and exacerbating the risk for additional power outages.
Cuts at Bonneville and other power marketing administrations across the country have left utilities that rely on their electricity scrambling to assess the damage. Scott Simms, CEO and executive director of the Public Power Council, said in an email the mass departures raise concerns for public health and safety alongside economic concerns and, “frankly overall system value and continuity.”
Not only is the Trump administration undercutting Bonneville right now, Miller said, it’s handicapping BPA for future generations.
And it’s not over yet. A Feb. 26 memo from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget asked federal agencies to submit reorganization plans within two weeks and prepare for additional “reductions in force.”
If Bonneville and other power marketing administrations aren’t exempted from these firings, Hardy said, deeper pain will appear on the horizon.
