The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which reports to the US Department of Energy (DOE), is seeing a nearly 20% employee layoff after the Trump administration sent “Fork in the Road” emails offering the Deferred Resignation program, which follows a federal hiring freeze.

Nicole Hughes, executive director at Renewable Northwest, told NPM that if the BPA doesn’t have an effective workforce, then the region isn’t going to get critical investments in infrastructure needed to keep the economy going.

“BPA is, for lack of a better term, an economic engine for this region,” she said. “Our members who develop renewable energy projects across the Pacific Northwest are also trying to deliver these projects to load centers in the region.”

She emphasized that two states in the Pacific Northwest, which are Oregon and Washington state, have clean energy mandates, while others, such as Idaho, have high reliability concerns with load increasing in the area.

“We need BPA staff to process the interconnection requests and to build the transmission needed to meet this new growing load,” she said.

John Hairston, administrator and CEO of the BPA, said during the administration’s 1Q25 report on February 13 that Trump issued a hiring freeze on January 20.

“All recruitment actions, including the job postings to fill the CFO position, are now on hold until further notice,” he said. “A similar freeze is in effect for supplemental labor.”

Regarding the “Deferred Resignation” email sent to all federal employees, it offered a program allowing staff to resign or remain on the payroll for eight months. That window to respond to the email closed on February 12.

“So far, we have approximately 200 BPA employees who have accepted this offer, but that could change on desires to rescind or late applications to that offer,” he said. “We will perform a workforce analysis and staffing plan in preparation for the program’s implementation.”

He added that BPA took action to comply with another executive order (EO) to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, as well as bring its remaining workforce back to the office fulltime.

Regional projects at risk

Hughes explained that BPA had identified 23 transmission projects that it was trying to complete before the 2030 to 2035 timeframe.

“These are critically important projects needed for system reliability and to help deliver clean energy,” she said. “These projects are at risk now without the transmission staff to be able to see them through, so we are very concerned that these projects are going to be delayed and that could have a very significant ripple effect across the region.”

Some of these Evolving Grid transmission projects include the Forest Grove-McMinnville-1 115 kV line upgrade, McNary-Patterson Tap 115 kV line, Mothern Mid-Columbia Project, Carlton area upgrades, Richland-Stevens Drive 11 kV line, as well as the Cross Cascades North upgrades, Big Eddy-Chemawa 230/500 kV line upgrade, and Portland area upgrades.

In terms of generation projects at risk, Hughes said that BPA has – over the years – seen an increase in the number of projects in its interconnection transmission queue. BPA had reached a point where they could no longer process them all, she said.

NPM queue data is tracking 488 pre-operational projects in the BPA across 122.3 GW.

“We’ve been trying for years to get BPA some relief from some of the federal pay scale caps in order to hire more competitive engineers to process these projects and have been working with Congress on this strategy to allow them to hire more people, to pay better,” Hughes said. “Now this is coming at a time when the BPA workforce is more important than ever and we can’t stand to lose more people.”

Hughes stated that these projects are now at risk of being delayed. For the projects in the queue, this includes 65 GW of pending transmission service requests currently.

“We knew those projects were being delayed with the impact of the existing workforce problems with the BPA, and now they will be even further delayed,” she said. “The projects behind these requests could decide to pack up and go. It costs money to keep a project in the queue and with this news, we are worried developers will walk away from the region.”

Next steps

For the short term, Hughes said that “we don’t have a work around.”

“Our region relies very heavily on the BPA transmission system,” she said. “All of our major utilities that serve load in the region, their balancing areas are completely surrounded by BPA’s transmission. To get the resources they need, they have to have access to this transmission system and these critical upgrades being developed to meet growing load.”

For now, she said this means delays and that the Pacific Northwest is at risk of facing serious reliability issues over the next several years.

“We had concerns going into this year that Oregon and Washington would not be able to meet their clean energy mandates, and now it is a certainty that they won’t be able to,” Hughes said.

In the long term, she said that Renewable Northwest has been working on legislative concepts to establish state transmission authorities where an authority would be able to kickstart finance for infrastructure where it might otherwise be held back.

“I could see a scenario where Oregon and Washington develop a transmission authority that gets the process started for critical infrastructure that a utility like Portland General or PacifiCorp could own and operate,” she said.

In fact, other states out West currently have these transmission authorities in place, such as New Mexico and Colorado. Other states are working on concepts, including Oregon, Washington state, and Montana this legislative session. Utah also has one that it is considering.

Oregon is scheduled to hear its version of this bill on February 25. Its legislative session is set to run through June. If the bill passes and the governor signs off on it, Hughes said it could take another couple years before it is up and running.

“We don’t think it is a silver bullet, but want to make sure there’s enough opportunities out there to continue investment going forward,” she said.

Renewable Northwest has been involved in helping form the concept for the past year and a half, having seen challenges to the transmission system coming for some time.

“There’s lots of things getting in the way of building critical infrastructure right now,” she said, pointing to strict land use laws in the region, wildfire impacts taking a toll on utilities building infrastructure, and now reduction of staff to BPA.

“I don’t think people understand the potential negative economic ripple effect these layoffs at BPA will have and there could not be worse timing in our region,” she said. “I hope people will reach out to their elected officials and make sure they understand how critical it is that we keep BPA afloat.”