'People were nervous' | Trump hits top US renewables R&D centre with workforce cuts
NREL layoffs came as surprise to some who thought it nimble enough to 'dodge' Trump's drive to slash federal spending
US President Donald Trump ramped his war on renewable energy with mass layoffs at the nation’s top research centre, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
“NREL has experienced workforce impacts affecting 114 employees across the laboratory, including staff from both research and operations, who were involuntarily separated today,” the research centre under the Department of Energy (DoE) said in a statement.
The news follows last week’s budget proposal that includes sweeping cuts to clean energy and climate-focused programmes that fall under what Trump calls “the green new scam”.
Trump has made undoing former President Joe Biden's energy transition legacy a key goal of his administration, leading to policy reversals and regulatory freezes across renewables.
Sources among the staffers let go who requested anonymity said that despite Trump’s disdain for all renewables and the obvious DoE staff reductions, the layoffs still came as a surprise.
'False pretense'
They made it “sound like layoffs were not quite as imminent as they obviously were,” this person added.
“NREL continues to navigate a complex financial and operational landscape shaped by the issuance of stop work orders from federal agencies, new federal directives, and budgetary shifts,” an NREL spokesperson said in a statement.
Trump's budget
The layoffs follow Trump’s budget proposal introduced last week that seeks to slash more than $22bn from clean energy and climate programmes, part of the larger goal of reducing spending by $163bn next year. The proposal covers non-defence discretionary spending.
Trump’s budget would cancel more than $15bn in “Green New Scam funds committed to build unreliable renewable energy, removing carbon dioxide from the air, and other costly technologies,” it said.
Cancellations would only affect “unplanned and unobligated balances” though, and “would not impact any currently awarded projects”, it added.
Trump's proposal would also cut DoE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) funding by $2.5bn and reorient it towards “early-stage research and development programming”.
DoE’s Advanced Research Project Agency‒ Energy (ARPA-E), which has backed pilot floating wind platforms, would see funding reduced by $260m to reach “a fiscally responsible level for high risk, high reward research advancing reliable energy technologies,” it said.
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