Are Hanford federal shutdown layoffs imminent? What we know

The Hanford nuclear site is preparing for many Department of Energy workers to be furloughed starting Monday.

Contractor employees, who account for the majority of Hanford jobs, will work as long as money holds out, whether a few weeks or well into December.

Energy department officials have not responded to questions about furloughs of federal workers while the federal government remains shut down, but multiple employees at Hanford have told the Tri-City Herald that furloughs are set to begin.

Hanford employs about 13,000 workers, most of them as private sector employees for companies that DOE hired as contractors for Hanford cleanup work.

Contractors and their work are managed by DOE employees.

At the start of the Trump administration, the Hanford site had more than 300 federal workers. That appears to have dropped to just under 230.

Furloughed DOE employees may be eligible for unemployment benefits, which federal employees currently working without pay cannot claim.

The state of Washington was able to provide unemployment benefits to federal workers during the last partial government shutdown from December 2018 to January 2019, but federal guidance has changed, according to the state.

Hanford has been getting by so far during the nearly month-long furlough by using money carried over from fiscal year 2025, which ended Sept. 30.

Some Hanford contractors have carry-over funds to last them well into December, keeping workers on the job and being paid until at least then, should the government shutdown continue that long.

Others may have as little as a couple of weeks of funds left. However, funding might also be found to keep their workers on the job into December.

H2C, the Hanford tank farm contractor, notified the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council earlier in October that it planned to temporarily lay off 733 union workers by Oct. 20 because of the federal government shutdown.

Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, or H2C, employs about 2,500.

However, on Oct. 8, a day after HAMTC was notified, the letter of notification was rescinded as premature and efforts continued to delay any layoffs.

Jeffrey McDaniel, the president of HAMTC, said then that there was less carry-over money available for H2C than for other DOE contractors at Hanford. HAMTC is an umbrella group for 15 unions doing work at Hanford.

The 580-square-mile Hanford site in Eastern Washington adjacent to Richland was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce almost two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

The work left radioactive and hazardous chemical waste and contamination that is being cleaned up at a cost of about $3 billion per year.