The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s leading centers of climate research, has been hit by a new round of departures, just 24 hours after hundreds of employees were fired.
About 500 employees left the agency on Friday after taking the so-called deferred resignation offer, according to three people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified by name out of fear of retaliation. Under that program, staff at NOAA and other agencies have been told that they can stop working now and be paid through September.
“I want to thank all of our departing team members for their service to NOAA and our Nation,” Nancy Hann, NOAA’s acting administrator, wrote in an email, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times. “The NOAA mission remains as vital as ever to the American people.”
Ms. Hann added that NOAA’s leadership was working “to identify the mission impacts of these departures and I will communicate any changes we need to make as a result.”
Those deferred-resignation departures are in addition to the more than 800 probationary staff who were fired on Thursday. Those staff members were fired not because they were necessarily less valuable than other employees, but because they lacked the protection of staff who had been in their current roles for more time.
A former budget analyst at NOAA who was terminated on Thursday and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said they felt disheartened. They said there was already a shortage of budget analysts at NOAA who work to make efficient cuts to the agency’s budget.
“These are the exact functions the administration wants to do with government efficiency,” the budget analyst said. They had just re-signed their lease on their apartment two days before.
The two rounds of departures together represent about 10 percent of NOAA’s roughly 13,000 employees. A spokesman for the agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A fish biologist with NOAA Fisheries made habitat maps for critically endangered species in the southeast, including corals and whales. They had served NOAA for eight years before receiving their termination email on Thursday. They had been promoted to their new position in 2023 and were on a two-year probationary period that would have ended in September.
The biologist spoke on the condition of anonymity as they fight to get their job back. They submitted a letter to the Office of Special Counsel a few hours after they were terminated calling the termination “unfair and unlawful.”
In the letter, they noted that their termination lacked sufficient evidence to show “any inadequacy of my performance or my conduct.” They noted they’d received two positive performance reviews filed to NOAA over the last nine months in which they were rated an “exceptional employee,” and that they weren’t given advanced notice or an opportunity to respond to the proposed termination as required by federal law, according to the letter.
Instead, they received their termination email at 3:42 p.m. and were given 78 minutes to react before their termination was official.
NOAA has been singled out for especially deep cuts by members of the Trump administration. Project 2025, the policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation that is reflected in many of the actions taken by the administration so far, calls the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The document urges that NOAA be dismantled and some of its programs terminated.
At a news conference on Friday attended by lawmakers and former NOAA officials, Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, said the cuts at NOAA signaled the start of the implementation of the Project 2025 plan in this area of government.
“This is Donald Trump making good on a very specific promise from Project 2025, and that is dismantling and privatizing NOAA, forcing Americans to pay for things like weather data and lifesaving weather alerts,” Mr. Huffman said. “This is going to have profound negative consequences on the day-to-day lives of Americans.”
Almost 200 of the roughly 500 departures were by people who work in the National Weather Service, a division within NOAA, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified by name.
The service has been the focus of President Trump’s ire in the past. In the summer of 2019, Mr. Trump claimed that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama. After a National Weather Service meteorologist in Alabama posted on social media that Dorian would not affect Alabama, Mr. Trump’s staff ordered NOAA leaders to say the meteorologist had been wrong, or risk being fired.
Dorian did not reach Alabama. But Neil Jacobs, the acting head of NOAA at the time, bowed to pressure, issuing a statement that called the posting by its Alabama weather office “inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.” An investigation into the episode later rebuked Dr. Jacobs, saying he had violated the agency’s code of ethics.
This month, Mr. Trump nominated Dr. Jacobs to lead the agency again.
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