Multiple employees for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration working in the agency’s Woods Hole and Narragansett Bay facilities had their positions eliminated by the agency on Thursday, according to 10 current and former employees of those labs and offices. The employees affected worked across the agency, including several in facilities and fisheries management.
The cuts affected people in their probationary periods of employment, which last one to two years at the agency. NOAA would not confirm the number of people whose jobs were cut at the two facilities, but several employees from Woods Hole said that branch provided the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with a list of 23 names of probationary employees back in January. National news outlets like CBS and The New York Times have estimated the number of employees affected across the country is in the hundreds.
Sarah Cierpich was among the employees terminated from one of the campuses in Woods Hole after working for the agency for 19 years – first as a contractor, and then, since September 9 of last year, as a federal employee. She said she had called out sick yesterday, fell asleep, and then woke up to the bad news.
“I woke up to my boss calling me, saying, ‘Can you check your email?’” she said.
The termination email that came from Vice Admiral Nancy Hann, the new undersecretary of NOAA, made Cierpich feel “disrespected and disgusted,” she said.
Cierpich had worked in the fisheries observer program, an area of NOAA that collects data that can help ensure that commercial fishers are not taking more than their allotment and are properly reporting their catch. If fishermen are taking too many fish, populations can dwindle and even crash. One of her special focus areas was the scallop fleet in New Bedford – one of the most valuable fisheries in the United States.
“They don’t know what I do, obviously, or they wouldn’t just let me go,” she said. “The amount of institutional knowledge that they lost by doing this is just stupid. And I just cried. I was mad. I was sad.”
Cierpich said she made about $70,000 annually at NOAA. She said she is also worried about how her termination will affect her health insurance. She said she and her colleagues did not receive any communication about the future status of their health plans. Cierpich has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a collagen defect that affects connective tissue and requires periodic surgeries to treat.
Cierpiech and another former employee interviewed for this story said they were hired at NOAA under a Diversity Equity and Inclusion hiring program for people with disabilities called schedule A. Both said they were asked in recent weeks to remove pronoun identifiers from their communications and profiles.
Other employees who spoke with The Public’s Radio asked not to be publicly identified because they hope to one day work for NOAA again.
Several of the employees said the firings of scientists and data collectors combined with new federal mandates could have dire effects on New England fish populations. A new executive order prevents agencies like NOAA from independently enacting new policies, something it typically does annually to keep fish populations from crashing. Now fisheries that are experiencing lower than normal population numbers will continue to be fished at the same rate as the year prior, which the NOAA employees say is likely to result in over-fishing.
Senator Jack Reed decried the NOAA staffing cuts during a press conference Friday, saying the agency “does fundamental research about the ocean at a time in climate change where the ocean is undergoing incredible changes in temperature and migration of fish.”
“This is rejecting knowledge and embracing ignorance,” said Reed.
David Wright contributed additional reporting.
This story was reported by The Public’s Radio.
