For decades, employment experts have warned of the pitfalls of big staff cuts: companies may save money in the short term, but it’s often at the expense of efficiency and employee trust.

And in the long term, research shows the workplace environment after cuts could lead to a voluntary exodus by overworked employees, who take special skills and knowledge with them.

Federal agencies appear to be testing this research. As part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to trim the government workforce, many probationary employees at federal departments were fired. Those cuts come on top of other efforts expected to push hundreds from Oregon’s federal workforce.

Bonneville Power Administration — a Department of Energy agency crucial to providing electricity to Pacific Northwest homes and businesses — has slashed more than 400 positions. That includes 100 fired probationary employees, another 90 people who had received job offers from BPA and then had them rescinded, and more than 200 employees who resigned and took a buyout. A fraction of those jobs specifically protected by federal law were restored recently.

Related: Bonneville Power Administration reverses 30 job cuts, continues with plans to eliminate 430 positions

Employees leaving the agency include linemen, engineers, and substation operators — people with years of required training to respond to power outages and intense weather events that could damage the electric grid.

“The Trump administration’s slogan is ‘Unleash American Energy,’” said Hal T. Nelson, associate professor and director of the energy policy and management graduate certificate program at Portland State University. “And in this case, it’s likely to unleash American blackouts.”

‘They’re not a heavy bureaucracy’

Nelson and other experts who closely watch Bonneville Power Administration point out the agency is self-funded: it covers costs by selling wholesale power generated at federally-owned dams to utilities. BPA’s workforce was already considered lean.

“They’re not a heavy bureaucracy,” Nelson said. “They’re not overly well staffed to begin with. We’ve seen a lot of baby boomers retire. It’s hard to hire for the federal government. Replacing folks and competing against Google and Facebook and the private sector, investor-owned utilities, it’s really hard for them to recruit talented people. And this is going to make that even more difficult.”

The job cuts from the Trump Administration could immediately slow down the agency’s ability to respond to outages, experts said. In the long term, the loss of talent will almost certainly hurt the agency’s ability to plan for the region’s future energy needs at a time when electricity demand is skyrocketing — both for a growing economy, and for the tens of thousands of new houses Oregon hopes to build in the coming years.

Related: Bonneville Power staff departures under President Trump raise concerns about Northwest electrical grid

BPA manages around 15,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines that help feed power to more than 3 million people in the Northwest.

Across the country, however, transmission lines have two major problems: 1) Because transmission lines are expensive and time-consuming to build, there aren’t enough of them — especially as power-hungry data centers and the push to electrify everything drive up power demand. And, 2) The transmission lines that do exist are aging and have less of a chance of surviving intense weather events.

“Polar vortexes, heat domes, increasing wildfires — those are affecting the operation of the electrical grid to a profound degree,” Nelson said. “And that is happening really quickly in terms of the scale of the electrical grid. The grid’s been around for 50 to a hundred years in places, but never has it had to deal with these kinds of extreme weather events.”

At BPA, Nelson is particularly concerned about the 90 rescinded job offers, a move he called “dangerous.” It means the agency is not just losing long-term experience from people taking buyouts, it’s missing out on new talent tasked with planning for intensifying weather and increasing power demand.

Related: Wyden, Merkley urge Trump to reconsider ‘ludicrous’ job cuts at Bonneville Power

BPA may be just one Department of Energy agency, but a similar story could be playing out across federal agencies. It’s a stark reversal from the previously held belief that a job with the federal government was one of the most secure.

Thomas Girouard spent more than 12 years as a lineman for BPA before retiring in 2021. Because it was with the federal government, when he took the job at BPA he expected to spend the rest of his career there.

“I never really felt like there was any kind of job insecurity,” Girourd said.

But now, the uncertain employment environment could mean more employees will jump ship — further jeopardizing BPA’s ability to meet future power needs while maintaining current lines.

“It would be naive to think that if you’re going to inject a lot of uncertainty on people who have very specialized skills — skills that we need at BPA — and you’re going to tell them that you may or may not be fired at any point, why wouldn’t they consider working for an institution that’s not gonna have that uncertainty?” said Greg Dotson, University of Oregon associate law professor who previously held senior energy and environmental staff positions in Congress. “It’s just a natural human response.”

Wildfire season is rapidly approaching — a time when BPA employees carefully maintain and watch transmission lines that could spark fires. The federal utility has long helped respond to electrical equipment damaged in blazes. Dotson is concerned that Oregonians could feel the impact of the job cuts sooner rather than later.

“I just worry, as someone who uses the electricity system in Oregon and has some familiarity with energy policy,” he said, “that we could end up really regretting what’s happened with employment at BPA in the coming months.”