The Department of Energy staff at the Hanford nuclear site in Eastern Washington now has had almost 50 people in a staff of about 300 laid off and more cuts may be coming.
The reduction so far is about 16% of DOE’s Hanford workforce, which was 78% staffed when the layoffs were announced.
Those leaving federal service include workers picked for layoffs who were still in probationary status — which can last for a year or more after being hired or promoted — and also people who volunteered for layoffs in what the federal government called “delayed resignations.”
Most of those who volunteered after promises of pay through September are retiring from the federal government, said Brian Vance, the DOE Hanford site manager in response to questions at the Tri-City Regional Chamber of Commerce meeting this week.
“I don’t think we are at the end,” he said as he described plans to move forward with a smaller staff.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and U.S. Office of Personnel Management told federal agencies to prepare to initiate large-scale reductions in force.
The memo said that the federal government is “costly, inefficient and deeply in debt” and that “tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens.”
Agency heads were given a deadline of March 13 to develop reduction-in-force and reorganization plans.
The memo gave suggestions such as renegotiating provisions of collective bargaining agreements and eliminating functions that are not mandated by law, plus firing underperforming employees and reducing staff through attrition.
No more than one employee should be hired for every four employees who leave federal jobs, the memo said.
Hanford site contractor workers
Hanford is unusual in the federal government because most work is contracted out, and the Wednesday memo also briefly addressed contractor workers paid with federal tax dollars.
Whether they could be affected by federal cuts and to what extent is unclear.
Hanford’s DOE workers are responsible for negotiating with regulators to agree on the environmental cleanup work that must be done, the standards that must be met and the schedule for completing work.
They oversee contractor work to ensure it is done safely and correctly and that it meets the extensive regulatory requirements set by state and federal governments.
The OMB and Office of Personnel memo Wednesday said that agencies should “maximally reduce the use of outside consultants and contractors.”
However, the memo also emphasized that the agency focus should be on eliminating work that is not legally required “while driving the highest quality, most efficient delivery of their statutorily required functions.”
Much of Hanford work being done by contractor employees is legally mandated. It is guided by the legally binding Tri-Party Agreement and a federal court enforced consent decree.
The environmental cleanup work at the nuclear reservation now employees about 13,000, most of them contractors and subcontractors. Hanford, as an enterprise with multiple private contractors, is the largest employer in the Tri-Cities.
The Hanford site adjacent to Richland was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
Since 1989 work has focused on cleanup of the extensive radioactive and hazardous chemical contamination and waste left from the wartime work.
About $70 billion has been spent on the cleanup effort to date, including to protect the Columbia River that flows through the site, with another 60 years of work expected to complete cleanup.
It has been called the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.
Hanford and Project 2025
Project 2025, a document that appears to be the blueprint for federal cost reductions and was co-authored by the new head of the OMB, calls Hanford “a particular challenge” as a national environmental liability.
States and some contractors seem to see the site as a “jobs program and have little interest in accelerating the cleanup,” according to Project 2025.
It calls for accelerating the cleanup, which could help retain contractor jobs.
Taxpayers could be saved $500 billion if 14 DOE sites used for nuclear work are cleaned up by 2035 and the remaining site, Hanford, is cleaned up by 2060, Project 2025 said.
“Such a commitment will require increased funding,” it said.
Now DOE plans to take until 2086 to complete what may be its most challenging work, turning 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste into stable forms for permanent disposal.
Current Congressional appropriations for Hanford have fallen short of the amount required to meet legal deadlines. The Hanford budget in fiscal 2024 was about $3 billion, but meeting legal obligations would have cost almost $3.8 billion, said the Washington state Department of Ecology.
Project 2025 also calls for revisiting the regulatory framework for Hanford.
“Hanford poses significant political and legal challenges with the state of Washington, and DOE will have to work with Congress to make progress in accelerating cleanup at that site,” according to Project 2025.
Priorities after layoffs
The most immediate challenge at Hanford is keeping cleanup on track with fewer DOE workers to do planning, oversight and other tasks that allow contractors to do the hands-on work.
Vance said the remaining DOE staff will need to refocus on the mission of environmental cleanup at Hanford, and that may mean not supporting some projects it has in the past, such as cleanup to clean energy initiatives.
Although Vance did not discuss specifics, DOE announced in July under the Biden administration that it planned to develop up to 8,000 acres of unused land near the southeast edge of Hanford into a gigawatt-scale solar energy project.
It was proposed as one of the largest, if not the largest, solar and battery storage energy projects in the nation.
The DOE leadership team will “evaluate critical functions and make sure that we are adjusting our staffing to support those critical functions,” Vance said. “And then we’re really going to continue to work with our contractor partners to look for opportunities we can partner even more to mitigate those losses (of federal employees.)”
The Hanford site will remain safe and secure, he said.
He is emphasizing the role Hanford workers play in public safety as thousands of federal jobs are being cut across the nation, including in his recent discussions with Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., whose district includes the Hanford site.
“We are actually boots on the ground in a community executing a mission of national prominence to clean up the Hanford site and there is a public safety aspect to that we need to continue to reinforce,” he said.
The federal team at Hanford needs to be sufficiently staffed to enable the contractor workforce to do their jobs, he said.
DOE has not made public what jobs were held by workers who were laid off at Hanford in February.
However, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., has said they include safety engineers and environmental scientists.
Hanford site cleanup
Vance continues to say that DOE is on pace to meet two long-awaited milestones advancing Hanford cleanup in 2025, even with job cuts.
Some of the less radioactive waste in leak-prone underground tanks since the 1940s could be turned into a stable glass form this summer, allowing its permanent disposal.
Construction on Hanford’s massive vitrification plant began in 2002, with construction and commissioning nearly complete to start glassifying low activity radioactive waste within months, and construction continuing on the portion of the plant needed to treat high level radioactive waste.
DOE also has all the equipment and facility work done to start moving 1,936 capsules holding highly radioactive cesium and strontium from underwater storage in a pool in the aging Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility to safer dry storage.
The capsules contain about a third of the radioactivity at the Hanford site.
Work started to preparations to move the 22-inch-long capsules after issues were raised concerning the structural integrity of the pool in which they were held and the possibility that an earthquake could damage the 52-year-old structure and allow a release of radioactive material.
DOE plans to move the first capsule of cesium this year.
