After an uproar over staffing cuts at the Bonneville Power Administration, the Trump administration is trying to rehire a handful of staffers it laid off last week.  

Bonneville, a federal agency funded by ratepayers instead of Congress, has seen more than 400 of its 3,100 employees accept buyouts, retire early, lose their job offers or be laid off in the past few weeks as the Trump administration has attempted to drastically downsize the federal workforce.  

About 125 staffers took a deferred resignation option offered via email last month, said Scott Simms, the executive director of the Public Power Council that represents the region’s consumer-owned utilities. Another 105 employees gave early notice of retirement, and 90 people who were starting work soon saw their offers rescinded.  

Bonneville, which owns three-quarters of the Pacific Northwest’s electrical transmission grid, has about 400 “probationary” employees hired in the past one to two years, and between 125 and 200 of them got termination notices last week, said Simms, who gathered the rough numbers from multiple sources. 

BPA’s laid-off employees include electricians, lineworkers, cybersecurity experts and engineers, according to Washington U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s office.  

But after calls for justification from several U.S. senators and former BPA leaders amid concerns over increased blackouts, the Trump administration offered 30 of Bonneville’s “mission critical” workers their jobs back, Simms said.  

U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse said Tuesday he told the Trump administration “there should be a more nuanced approach to terminations and furloughs,” referring to cuts at Bonneville as well as the Hanford nuclear cleanup site and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  

“I have concerns that the unintended consequences of these workforce reductions will have long-lasting implications,” Newhouse continued. “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.” 

A spokesperson for Newhouse said his office was trying to get exact numbers of affected employees from Bonneville. Before President Donald Trump took office last month, Newhouse and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat who represents a district in southwest Washington, proposed a law to address existing hiring and retention issues at Bonneville. 

Simms said the Trump administration’s shakeup will make it even harder to attract workers. 

Bonneville’s thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 31 hydroelectric dams provide power to Washington, Oregon, Montana and elsewhere. Customers in Washington state include the Snohomish County Public Utility District, Tacoma Public Utilities and the Clark County PUD, among others. 

After news of the layoffs broke, two former Bonneville administrators wrote in a letter that reducing staffing “will seriously degrade BPA’s ability to maintain reliable power service.” 

“Normally BPA power is delivered with an outage probability of well less than one percent,” former CEOs Steve Wright and Randy Hardy wrote. “These changes will increase that probability dramatically.” 

In light of the news, Simms proposed new mutual aid agreements between Bonneville and local utilities, like they’d use during major outages from a storm or extreme heat.  

While BPA would usually handle repairs itself, this would allow the agency to team up with local workers to make fixes before they cause customers to lose power. This could help fill in the service gaps created with Bonneville losing a chunk of its staff, Simms said. 

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order entitled “Unleashing American Energy” in hopes of improving the reliability of the nation’s energy supply. Simms said Bonneville would be well-suited to help the administration’s goals. 

Early in Trump’s first term, he proposed selling off Bonneville’s transmission grid and privatizing the agency, a move that drew bipartisan rebukes that argued the proposal would be sure to raise costs for consumers. 

The layoffs at Bonneville were among 1,800 employees let go across the Department of Energy, Murray said over the weekend. 

This story is republished from the Washington State Standard, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet that provides original reporting, analysis and commentary on Washington state government and politics.