The Bonneville Power Administration, the region’s largest transmission grid operator, will lose at least 600 workers under President Donald Trump’s sweeping efforts to reduce the federal workforce, including essential positions like dispatchers who control the electric grid.
That represents close to 20% of BPA’s workforce of 3,100. More workers could leave through early retirement. What’s more, the agency has imposed a hiring freeze in response to Trump’s executive orders, which means it cannot hire replacement workers.
Politicians and experts in Oregon said such a large number of workers leaving could undermine BPA’s ability to operate the grid and lead to blackouts in the region.
Bonneville, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, owns and operates 15,000 miles – 75% – of the Northwest’s high-voltage transmission lines. It markets hydropower from 31 federal dams in the Columbia River Basin and supplies a third of Northwest electricity.
About 200 BPA workers accepted Trump’s buyout offer, according to the agency’s quarterly presentation earlier this week. They’re part of the roughly 75,000 federal workers who have signed up for the buyout across the country, according to a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management.
Additionally, 400 probationary BPA employees have been laid off, according to the office of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. And 90 workers had their new job offers rescinded, U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley of Oregon said.
Many of those leaving hold essential positions with years of experience, including power dispatchers, substation operators, line workers, engineers and electricians, according to agency insiders and Murray’s office.
The departures pose a “direct and immediate threat to the reliability of the electrical grid that serves millions of American families and businesses in the Pacific Northwest,” Wyden and Merkley said in a terse letter to Trump, which called the cuts “reckless” and “financially ludicrous.”
“We do not believe there is an energy emergency, but your actions certainly appear to be creating one through these cuts that actively jeopardize the stability of our energy infrastructure, right now,” the Democrats said in the letter sent on Friday.
BPA declined to confirm any of those numbers nor positions. It also declined to comment on the impact of the buyouts and referred all inquiries to the U.S. Department of Energy, which also did not reply.
Local experts and BPA customers said they were worried about the impact of important positions at the agency going unmanned.
“Bonneville is not an administrative paper-pushing agency,” said Randy Hardy, an energy consultant and former BPA administrator. “Bonneville is an operating utility. It runs the Northwest power grid. Losing these people could have serious consequences.”
Most troubling, said Hardy, is the loss of employees – dispatchers, transmission schedulers and real-time traders – at the BPA Dittmer Control Center in Vancouver, Washington where power is dispatched and the grid is monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
“These people can’t be hired,” Hardy said. “They’re the most experienced and knowledgeable people in the organization and BPA’s inability to cover that shortfall, even in the near term, is quite problematic, and that could lead to power outages, unplanned power outages caused by staffing shortages in the critical area.”
That sentiment was echoed by the region’s utility users.
“It takes a very specialized workforce to keep a grid this size running 24/7,” said Scott Simms
CEO and executive director of the Public Power Council, an association that represents over 100 consumer-owned electric utilities in the Pacific Northwest.
“Millions of people depend on BPA to run a reliable system in communities large and small across Oregon and neighboring states,” Simms said. “Electricity production and delivery is tricky at this scale under normal circumstances and certainly in periods of system duress, such as during extreme cold or hot weather events, so the removal of key people just increases the chances of something bad happening.”
Simms, Hardy and the senators all pointed out that the administration’s thinning of BPA’s workforce will not save the administration any taxpayer money. That is because Bonneville – including its employees, facilities and interest on its debt – is funded entirely by the rates that it charges its customers and hence electric ratepayers in the Pacific Northwest.
David W. Brown, the founder of Obsidian Renewables, a Lake Oswego based renewable energy company, said it’s possible to make BPA more efficient, but the broad-stroked automatic cuts and the inability to hire specialty workers are not the way to do it. Brown’s company is currently in BPA’s interconnection and transmission queues for its approved, yet-to-be built 400 megawatt, 4,000-acre solar project in Lake County.
“An electric utility losing its dispatchers is like a railroad company losing the people who schedule safe use of railroad tracks,” Brown said. “Without an efficient scheduling function, traffic snarls, capacity is reduced, and safety is quickly at risk.”
It is also unclear what the workforce reduction could mean for BPA’s efforts to modernize the grid, including via its transmission construction and planning process. BPA lines are now nearly full and the agency has been swamped in recent years with ever-increasing requests from developers and utilities to connect new clean energy projects.
Earlier this month, BPA said it is pausing some of its transmission planning to consider reforms. Given that it likely has lost its newly hired transmission planners and designers, that process might be further held back.
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