Trump's former energy regulator offers up plan to purge workers overseeing the power grid
The former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would like to advise former President Donald Trump on which energy regulation employees can be laid off as part of a widespread MAGA restructuring of the civil service, Politico reported Thursday.
“For the @realDonaldTrump transition team - it [sic] you want schedule F insight on who to keep and who to remove @ferc please DM me,” wrote Neil Chatterjee on X.
He followed up by posting, “They reached out 7 minutes after I tweeted this.”
Speaking later to Politico, Chatterjee clarified that he told Trump's team, “These are offices you could squeeze from. These are offices where you really don’t want to tinker, because we’re talking about the reliability of the electric grid.”
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"Schedule F" is a controversial reclassification scheme that would strip merit protections from government employees, possibly allowing them to be fired based on the whims of the president or to ensure political loyalty. Trump tried to use this to reclassify huge swathes of government workers in his final year of office, but President Joe Biden reversed this. Trump could bring this back in his second term as outlined in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.
Trump in 2020 demoted Chatterjee from his position as chair.
According to Politico, his offer to Trump "drew criticism from other former FERC officials, who warned it could prompt an exodus of talented staff at the agency that regulates the nation’s interstate pipelines and electricity markets at a critical period for the power industry."
It also comes at a moment when: "Utilities, grid operators and state regulators have grown increasingly concerned about the power network’s ability to ensure reliability and accommodate new power generation — from both renewable energy and natural gas plants — that will be needed to meet skyrocketing demand driven by new data centers and a resurgence in manufacturing."
Civil service purges may also be led by far-right tech billionaire Elon Musk, whose super PAC ran field operations for Trump's 2024 campaign, and who has expressed interest in serving as an adviser on government reform.