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.
For those not familiar with the laboratory, NREL is essentially the NASA of renewable energy research, performing and funding research, publishing technical information and standards to both industry and private users, creating tools for analyzing renewable energy applications, and generally serving as a clearinghouse for information and guidance for renewable and sustainable energy technologies. It’s more than 3,500 employees and direct contractors are highly educated in energy-related technologies and devoted to their mission of developing and promoting advances in renewable energy, and although the capricious firing of 114 employees may not seem like a lot it is actually a very lean organization already (essentially the opposite of ‘bureaucratic bloat’) with many in managerial and leadership positions wearing multiple ‘hats’ overseeing various projects in a general area of research.
As of this morning, the NREL website—an invaluable resource for information and analysis of renewables—is unresponsive.
What always drives me insane about such things is that these people are probably not replaceable in the future. They could almost certainly make more money, in the US or abroad with their knowledge and skills, by working in industry. And why come back to a gutted team, for less money, and the knowledge that a large portion of the electorate could once again fire them for some imagined waste? Thus even if the damage is undone by some future legislative or presidential degree, they won’t be replaced by people of the same caliber in all likelyhood.
Same for every other team targeted by DOGE and Trump. The best will never be back - the damage is never going to be undone, and outside a very few, no one will realize what was lost.
Yup, that’s the other insane part of this. Losing the legacy skills, but more important knowledge and history will be impossible to get it back.
I’m a programmer for a small county government. I’ve let everyone know that I’ll be retiring. I let them know months ago. All I do right now is document, document, document (we have an inernal ‘wiki’). I’ve been there for 33 years. It’s been agreed that I’m not starting any big projects. It would be foolish to do so.
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
I looked into positions at NREL about a decade ago as a possible career change, figuring that while I hadn’t worked in renewable energy I have enough transferrable skills in thermodynamics, systems enginerring, GIS and geodesy, et cetera that shoudl be applicable. What I found is that NREL was actually very selective, and you generally needed to either have a PhD with a reserach focus in renewable enrgy or have worked their on an internship to be seriously considered, and I wasn’t up for spending three to five years going back to school for another graduate degree. The tools and analyses developed in NREL are used all over the renewable energy industry, both in the US and abroad, and as you say, many of these people fired (and the more that are likely coming) can probably find work but not without major disruption to their own lives and the loss of their knowledge and experience for everyone else as few commercial enterprises are going to invest money in open source tools or to publish research with proprietary applications.
Of course, the Trump regime is doing this in order to undermine renewable and sustainble development to support hydrocarbon energy extraction, but frankly it isn’t necessary; the petroleum and natural gas extraction industries are already gearing up to “drill, baby, drill” to the extent that they can get financial investment to do so, and there is essentially an inexhaustable appetite for energy regardless of source. All this is really doing is limiting the options in the most short-sighted and obtuse possible manner. It’s so fucking stupid.
One f the first things Ronald Regan did when taking office was to remove the solar panels from the White House. for decades, one of primary goals of the Republicans has been to despoil the land. Just as they like hurting people, they like wrecking the planet; spite is their prime motivation. The more harm they do, the happier they are.
So, they are always going to try to wreck renewable energy whenever they can. Not just or even mostly out of greed (which is why they don’t care about trying to profit from renewable energy), but because switching to renewables means less harm to the world, and that above all else they oppose. While they are quite happy to take money from the oil industry, I expect they’d happily smash renewable energy everywhere they could even if oil companies begged them to stop for some reason. The Right consistently values malice over money.
I don’t know how much this is still a factor today, but I recall, decades ago, encountering (IRL) the views of some religious conservatives/fundamentalists which were to the effect that: “The Bible says humans shall subdue the earth and use it up, then when it’s used up, things will be really bad and Jesus will come back. Therefore by all of your recycling and reducing and re-using and all of your green eco stuff, you’re delaying the return of Jesus!”
Ayup. Leaning far more into the dominionism than into the stewardship:
Dominion means humanity’s right to control and have power over the land and all other living beings. Stewardship refers to the responsibilities to the land that come with the right and power.