The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week fired its previously reinstated probationary workers, including many who worked at local facilities in Narragansett and Woods Hole.
NOAA employees in Rhode Island and Massachusetts told The Public’s Radio that they received a mass email on Thursday informing them their jobs had been terminated – again. The NOAA firings were also reported by The Guardian and Reuters.
Until Thursday, the employees had been in a state of paid limbo. However, the March 17 order that reinstated the fired NOAA employees to a form of paid leave “is no longer in effect,” according to an email shared with The Public’s Radio. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s general counsel in Washington, D.C. said in the email that “the Department is reverting your termination action to its original effective date.”
“Everyone I know who was in my situation has received the same message,” said Sarah Weisberg, a fisheries biologist formerly with NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Centers in Rhode Island. “Everyone who had been reinstated,’’ she said, “has now been un-reinstated.”
Janet Coit, a former NOAA administrator who was terminated in late January, said more than 800 probationary employees across the agency lost their jobs. Another 400 NOAA employees took voluntary resignation offers, she said. Between the two forms of cuts, Coit said NOAA has lost roughly 10 percent of what used to be a 12,000-employee workforce.
Nearly 24,000 probationary federal workers across 20 agencies were fired by President Trump’s administration in February in the name of government efficiency. The employees were then re-hired and placed on paid leave after a lower court ruled that the mass termination was unlawful.
The latest termination notices follow a ruling Wednesday by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia that vacated the lower court ruling. The decision cleared the way for the Trump administration to re-fire federal probationary workers, meaning employees in their first or second year on the job, or who have been recently promoted to new positions.
It’s unclear if other agencies besides NOAA have already moved to re-fire probationary workers. A probationary employee named Drew who relocated to Rhode Island to work at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Narragansett, said Friday that he had not received another termination notice, though he was anticipating one soon. (The Public’s Radio agreed to use only his first name because he worries that speaking publicly could hurt his chances of working in government again.)
The latest termination notices also raised doubts about whether the re-fired employees will receive any compensation for the weeks since mid-March when they were on paid administrative leave. The letter, signed by Acting General Counsel John K. Guenther, said that the Department “will waive any indebtedness created by the court’s order that you be paid beyond your termination date.”
