Donald Trump promised to unleash American energy. But in the first month of his presidency, the Department of Energy’s staff has been overwhelmed with very different work: deleting web pages from the department’s site, removing phrases like “diversity, equity and inclusion” from reports and fighting to keep employees who perform critical work.
If the goal is efficiency, eight current and former department staff who asked for anonymity to protect their jobs told NOTUS the Trump administration has failed. But if the goal is to paralyze the regular function of the federal government, then it’s working. In all the tumult, the agency is unable to prioritize the actual policies the Trump administration has said it wants, staffers said.
“There’s a power struggle for the heart of the agency,” one longtime staffer still at the agency said.
The staffer attributed the chaos to the Department of Government Efficiency, the Office of Personnel Management (where Elon Musk has reportedly set up shop) and the Office of Management and Budget. While agency staffers are now mostly finished with defending probationary hires and trying to implement a funding freeze on some Biden-era programs, the department is now contending with Trump’s Wednesday executive order, which expanded DOGE’s power over federal contracts.
The effects have already rippled outside the agency. At two major industry conferences this week, energy companies and state leaders told NOTUS that much future planning is on hold, that companies with major infrastructure projects are waiting for things to settle down inside the department and that it’s hard to reach people inside of DOE.
In one of his first moves in office, Trump ordered a freeze on all “green new deal” spending — an order that’s now wrapped up in a lawsuit about a separate OMB memo ordering a freeze on nearly all government grants. The OMB rescinded its memo after the judge instituted a restraining order. The same judge ultimately ordered for energy funds to be restored.
But now, with those funds finally restored, Trump has called for the creation of a centralized system to track and review all federal contracts — giving DOGE oversight authority.
This move comes after the indiscriminate firing of probationary employees, which had already disrupted the DOE’s efforts to transition to new policy priorities. Senior staffers are now even more nervous about the larger reduction in force the OMB and OPM have said should happen in the coming months. No staffer interviewed by NOTUS, even those in management, has any insight into a possible RIF at DOE, but they said that if the cuts are as widespread as before, many departments at DOE would become dysfunctional.
Though most of them have had limited contact with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his political staff, DOE staffers told NOTUS they’ve been able to glean that the most disruptive directives aren’t coming from him. Some political appointees have expressed frustration to career employees at the probationary firings, staffers said.
The DOE did not respond to request for comment. In a statement to NOTUS, OMB denied any disconnect between agency heads and the White House.
“This is a fake news story meant to drive a wedge between President Trump’s cabinet where there is none. Secretary Wright is doing a great job following the President’s agenda to halt Green New Deal hoax money,” said Rachel Cauley, OMB’s communications director.
Experts in areas of technology that Wright, Trump and congressional Republicans have said are priorities — like advanced nuclear, missile defense, biofuels, carbon capture and automated vehicles — were among those fired in the first round of firings.
“They’re cutting not fat, but tissue and bone,” a leader inside of DOE said.
The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, has lost almost all of its staff. About one-quarter of the Home Energy Rebates team, which manages more than $8 billion for people to lower their energy bills, was fired.
The Hanford nuclear site, which houses millions of gallons of radioactive waste in eastern Washington, has lost at least a dozen of its federal workers. The ratio of federal workers to contractors was already very low at Hanford, with a few hundred DOE employees to more than 10,000 contractors. One fired Hanford worker told NOTUS that even before the firings, they were already concerned about the federal government’s ability to oversee contractors.
Many of the fired probationary employees had over a decade of experience in the federal government and had recently been promoted, while others had come to the DOE from industry jobs at leading tech and finance companies, like Waymo and J.P. Morgan.
In some departments, career staff were allowed to advocate to try to keep probationary employees before they were fired, but that push rarely succeeded.
“If they really wanted to do this in a way that maximizes efficiency, it is not something that you can just be like, ‘Oh, anybody who is a probationary employee, rip them out,’” said one former staffer. “I had thought that there would be a bit more thought put into it.”
“My supervisors had assumed my team was fairly safe,” another said. “My role was pretty critical. We were managing things that were ongoing and active.” This person had significant knowledge about an ongoing project that no one else inside the agency possesses, they said to NOTUS.
With the staff losses, some departments aren’t doing future planning. Others are trying to figure out how to use fewer staff for the complicated, technical oversight work for money that is already spent and needs to be monitored. One staffer warned that the government’s ability to monitor how money is spent will be sharply curtailed.
“There are real human beings behind all federal programs that make them run. Without these people, programs will crumble and dissipate regardless of intention,” one fired worker said.
The people who remain at DOE are now talking about how to pivot to support ideas like automated vehicles and amplify and expand ongoing work on energy resilience, but they’re not sure if enough experts remain to make that happen.
“The staff that do remain are facing enormous workloads,” one fired worker said.
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS. She can be reached on Signal at annakramer.54