A handful of former employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who were fired, rehired, then fired again, have revealed that the federal government is now demanding money from them.
The workers told NBC News that they received debt notices from the government saying that they must pay for their health care coverage from when they were employed, coverage which some of them said they never even had to begin with.
Three former employees shared letters from June 16 titled “DEMAND NOTICE FOR PAYMENT,” which alleged that the workers owed the government money for health care premiums during pay periods in which their health coverage plans had already expired.
“They’re trying to bill me for health insurance after I was fired. I had no coverage,” a former special assistant in the agency’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, Ya’el Seid-Green, told NBC News.
“It’s just more salt in the wound on how incompetent all of this has been,” Seid-Green added.
The letters went on to say that if the debt was not paid, it would be reported to a credit bureau, which could affect the workers’ credit score.
“It’s very gloomy and threatening language,” the NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program Director Sarah Cooley said. Cooley was fired near the end of February.
Though not all employees received a letter, some of the ones who did are being charged hundreds of dollars.
The Commerce Department fired more than 600 probationary employees who were working at the NOAA during the wave of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts back in February.
Many of the fired workers were meteorologists, hurricane hunters, and storm modelers.
In March, a San Francisco federal judge ruled that probationary workers who had been laid off and worked for the government for less than a year had to be reinstated. The NOAA then placed these workers on administrative leave.
That same month, the Trump administration also revealed that it would be rehiring 24,500 federal workers who DOGE fired.
But in April, the Supreme Court paused many of the reinstatements, the NOAA deciding to fire its employees once again.
Workers like Seid-Green said that they did not have access to the necessary health benefits that should have been available to them while they were on administrative leave.
Seid-Green said she underwent surgery while on administrative leave, signing up for temporary continuation of coverage to pay for her health benefits.
Yet the program didn’t work. Seid-Green discovered after her surgery that her health coverage wasn’t active, meaning she had to pay twice for health coverage that she hasn’t yet received.
“I am getting letters demanding payment of more than $14,000 for my surgery,” she said. “Not only did they not give us coverage we paid for, now they’re sending us debt notices for the coverage we didn’t have.”
Another former employee, Sabrina Valenti, who used to work as a budget analyst at NOAA, said that the frenzy to fire, rehire, then re-fire employees has led to many mistakes on the part of the agency.
“I was fired four months ago and I still don’t have proof I was fired,” she said.
According to NBC News, after they reached out to the agency’s media affairs group for comment, probationary employees received another message from the NOAA.
“Our office has been made aware that you may have received a debt notice from the National Finance Center (NFC),” the email said. “Please know we are working with NFC to resolve this. No action is needed from you right now. We’ll keep you updated as we have more information.”
The post Government Demands Money From Fired Employees It Rehired Then Fired Again appeared first on The Daily Beast.
