Former FERC Chair Neil Chatterjee sparked concerns about the incoming Trump administration’s control of the federal bureaucracy and how that might impact the commission’s independence with a post on X on Nov. 6, the day after former President Donald Trump’s re-election. 

“For the [Trump] transition team: [If] you want schedule F insight on who to keep and who to remove [at FERC], please DM me,” Chatterjee posted on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. In a later post, he said Trump’s transition team got back to him “seven minutes after I tweeted this,” which he confirmed in an interview with RTO Insider. 

“Schedule F” refers to a new classification for federal workers that Trump created via executive order late in his first term. It applied to federal career employees with jobs connected to policy and made it easier to fire them. When that executive order was issued, the American Federation for Government Employees called it “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes.” 

President Joe Biden quickly revoked the order upon taking office, and in April 2024, the Office of Personnel Management completed a rulemaking to bolster labor protections for federal employees. But Trump has promised to reinstate the order, and the OPM rule could be overridden by a Republican-controlled Congress. 

FERC and other independent agencies are insulated from such White House edicts, only having to enact them if their appointed leadership decides to, Public Citizen Energy Program Director Tyson Slocum said. For example, the commission did not implement Biden’s proposed guidance on the National Environmental Policy Act, Slocum said. 

Chair James Danly, who ran FERC for the last 10 weeks of Trump’s first term after the president demoted Chatterjee, had started work on implementing Schedule F. 

Chatterjee expressed surprise to RTO Insider that his post set off criticism and argued that he was trying to help the commission’s staff. 

“I actually viewed it as me being helpful to commission staff; that I could speak on their behalf to the critical role they play around approving gas projects and overseeing reliability,” Chatterjee said. “And I didn’t intend or expect that people would view it the other way. I think it’s been mischaracterized a little bit.” 

The reality is that Trump wants to reinstate the concept of Schedule F, Chatterjee said. While his post on X said Chatterjee could tell the incoming administration “who to keep and who to remove,” he said he did not mean specific individuals. 

“I wasn’t talking about specific people, to be clear,” Chatterjee said. “Could you make changes within the various offices? I’m on the private sector side right now, you know; I’ve got a ton of folks that I work with that are going through reorganizations and reshuffling. The federal government should do the same thing.” 

Scott Hempling, a lawyer and leading expert on regulation who recently left his job as a FERC administrative law judge, said in a statement that the commission’s independence is vital to its work. 

“Hundreds of millions of lives, and an entire national economy, depend on the professionalism of our regulatory workforce,” Hempling said. “Regulation is effective only when ruled by three things: law, logic and facts. Infecting the workforce with anyone who doesn’t live by those limits disserves investors, consumers and the public trust.” 

Chatterjee said that even when staff disagreed with him, like on the minimum offer price rule in PJM, they still did their job. 

“I found during my tenure at the commission that even in instances where the staff disagreed with me, they still produced a very strong, legally defensible work product at the end of the day,” Chatterjee said. “And that’s one of the messages that I want to deliver to the incoming administration.” 

Slocum said that while he has had disagreements with FERC over the years, he said it is vital that the commission and its staff remain free from political meddling. Any who do feel improperly influenced by politics can reach out to Public Citizen, or other watchdog groups, he said. 

“FERC is an independent agency,” Slocum said. “It is unlawful for the administration to make staff decisions at an independent agency other than nominating commissioners and designating the chair, so it would be highly inappropriate for the Trump administration or any administration to make decisions about internal staffing at an agency.” 

Slocum said Trump was able to use his appointment authority in his first term by getting Chatterjee to name Anthony Pugliese as FERC’s chief of staff and Danly as its general counsel before the latter was nominated and confirmed as a commissioner. 

The question of when Trump will get to nominate a new member is up in the air, with no guarantee that Chair Willie Phillips will step down as commissioner when one of his Republican colleagues — either Commissioner Mark Christie or Lindsay See — is named chair. Phillips’ term ends June 30, 2026; the next seat to open is Christie’s in June 2025. Christie himself was nominated by Trump and is the only commissioner remaining from that first term. 

The fact that the commission has a full complement of five members could limit Trump’s ability to influence senior staffing decisions through his nominee, Slocum said. 

“Christie has established himself as being a very credible and important pro-consumer voice,” Slocum said. “See hasn’t [participated in] many orders, but she joined Christie for the Talen co-location order, rejecting it as being unfair to consumers,” which he applauded. (See FERC Rejects Expansion of Co-located Data Center at Susquehanna Nuclear Plant.) 

Former FERC Chair Richard Glick, who was a FERC commissioner under Trump before Biden tapped him to lead the commission in January 2021, said the discussion of bringing back Schedule F risks a brain drain at the commission. FERC staff have expertise that, especially for more senior members, is very attractive to the private sector, which can pay more than the government. 

“All you are doing here by putting out tweets is increasing their anxiety, and it’s going to cause them to leave sooner than they otherwise would,” Glick said. 

That would leave FERC less capable of tackling the important issues before it, with electricity demand surging around the country from data centers and the need to review LNG export facilities, Glick added. 

A longer-term front to watch out for in terms of FERC independence could come from the legal system. A conservative theory holds that the president’s limited authority to fire commissioners violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. 

The second sentence in Project 2025’s chapter on independent agencies references that theory: “In general, the president can appoint people to these commissions but cannot remove them, which makes them constitutionally problematic in light of the Constitution’s having vested federal executive power in the president.” 

The Appointments Clause was at issue in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a 2020 Supreme Court decision that found that the president’s inability to remove the head of an agency with a single director was unconstitutional. But in doing so, the majority opinion said the precedent held no weight for multimember, bipartisan commissions like FERC, and even the authors of Project 2025 noted that such arrangements generally have been upheld by the courts.