It was a tough summer at NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska regional office, where the longest days of the calendar year also brought some long workdays for a staff of fewer than 80 people.
What was once a 115-person office in January had been whittled to about 75 people under President Donald Trump’s monthslong downsizing of the federal bureaucracy, which at NOAA Fisheries included offering longtime staff buyouts and the firing of probationary employees.
Alaska Regional Administrator Jon Kurland in July recognized that new reality, implementing an “interim plan” to do the office’s work with fewer people, while at the same time meeting a new Trump executive order to “restore American seafood competitiveness,” in part by rolling back regulations on U.S. fishermen, including when and where they could fish.
“Put simply, we must realign our remaining staff to address the highest priorities, because we no longer have the resources to do everything we did before,” Kurland wrote in an email to other senior Alaska staff. “We need to confront our shared reality.”
