It was not immediately clear whether a federal hiring freeze instituted by the newly installed Donald Trump administration has affected the legacy nuclear cleanup by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which since Trump’s inauguration had posted only a single vacancy to a federal job site.
The listing on USAJobs.gov for a contracts specialist at the Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office opened Monday and closes Friday. The short duration of the opening leaves little time for outside candidates to submit a resume and book travel for an in-person interview and could indicate DOE wants to fill the position from within its own ranks. Doing so would not increase the size of the federal workforce.
The EM office in Washington, D.C., did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
President Donald Trump on Monday ordered “a freeze on the hiring of Federal civilian employees to be applied across the board in the executive branch” that “applies to all executive departments and agencies regardless of the sources of their operational and programmatic funding, excepting military personnel.” The order covers “vacant positions existing at noon on January 22, 2017.”
The administration added that “contracting outside the Government to circumvent the intent of this memorandum shall not be permitted.”
The freeze does not affect military personnel or political appointees. The latter category would include the full-time assistant secretary for environmental management Trump eventually will nominate to replace acting EM chief Susan Cange.
All told, and including positions outside the agency’s nuclear complex, DOE listed 27 federal job vacanacies at USAjobs.gov as of Wednesday. That includes the vacant Environmental Management position and eight jobs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is charged with sustaining the U.S. nuclear-weapon stockpile.
Only three of the eight NNSA jobs now listed were posted on or after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
Word of the Trump administration’s hiring freeze preceded the new president’s inauguration, prompting a rush of hiring and promotions at federal agencies in the final days of the Barack Obama administration.
Cange was among these. She joined DOE headquarters in December as principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, filling the slot vacated earlier in 2016 by fellow DOE Oak Ridge site alum Mark Whitney, who now works for AECOM: one of DOE’s biggest nuclear cleanup contractors and a nearly ubiquitous presence across the agency’s nuclear complex.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management employs about 1,400 civil servants nationwide.
