Staff at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Department of Energy division that guides public and private research and development involving renewable energy and energy efficiency, were blindsided with a round of layoffs on Monday morning.
Three lab sources told Mother Jones the cuts affect several NREL departments, including communications, wind, water, and community energy. Remote and in-person staffers are both affected, as are non-probationary employees—those who have worked at NREL for more than two years.
A current staffer described the firings as “rather haphazard and unorganized.” According to agency sources, even lab managers were not told of the cuts until Monday. The staffer said one colleague they’d spoken with had been fired after first being locked out of a work-issued laptop without explanation.
All three NREL sources said 114 staffers were cut, per their conversations with department leaders and an all-hands meeting where employees were told that the layoffs were due to funding being paused or cancelled. Internal documentation reviewed by Mother Jones confirms this number. (NREL has not responded to a request for comment.)
The cuts come less than a month after NREL staff received an email from their leadership team offering unpaid leave options, and just days after the White House released a budget calling for large cuts to renewable energy.
The lab has more than 3,000 employees, but the sources I spoke with said even modest layoffs will create bottlenecks. NREL “specifically hires to make sure that there is a person assigned to a specific amount of work and complete it,” said one source, and unlike NIH and NSF research, the lab’s work is driven in part by industry partnerships. “You have to hit a certain number of billable hours.”
The employee explains that while their schedules have changed—because so much staff time is now spent “attempting to prove our worth to the administration—the lab’s clients have not. “If I am suddenly the only person on my team, I can’t handle that work,” the employee told me.
“Until January, I loved my job,” they continued. Since Donald Trump took office, proving their worth has felt “like a fool’s errand.”
A NREL researcher told me that any feeling of “security and optimism is gone,” and pointed to a breach of trust between employees and managers. “They have kept us in the dark and insisted things were better than they are,” the researcher says. “It’s a huge loss in terms of talent and brainpower.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.