[Alas Babylon!]

If you fire them....they will merely take you to court and you will have to have cause-and-reason...too much paperwork, if you ask me.

I'm not sure that's 100% true in this case.

As the article states, Dept of Energy has about 10,000 Federal employees, but over 100,000 contractors.

Eliminating contracts (and therefore the contractors) doesn't need a court order.

The contract is just not renewed. Easy-peasy.

[9YearLurker]

100k contractors?

What, are most of those some schmoes out in the field offering “free” energy audits or something?

If so, I doubt they are the major problem.

[pepsionice]

A lot of these 100,000 contractors...are PhD folks. These are the ones who’ve been on some type of contract with DOE for two or three decades.