The Trump administration created a lost generation of would-be federal scientists, public land managers and park rangers when it summarily fired thousands of probationary government employees.
In the Interior Department and its bureaus, as well as in other natural resource-related agencies, the wholesale job cuts eliminated all manner of expertise.
The U.S. Geological Survey lost a social scientist helping smooth access to voluminous social science data. The Fish and Wildlife Service said goodbye to a biologist who moved to Las Vegas for her new gig and was helping clear an Endangered Species Act backlog. The National Park Service dismissed a sled dog handler at a remote Alaskan park. The Bureau of Land Management let go of a soil specialist who helped on multiple restoration projects.
Most of the thousands of federal workers fired in recent weeks were just in their first year or two on the job. Some were more seasoned but had recently taken on new positions and were placed back on probation. For example, Crystal Barnes, who described herself as a longtime public servant, had last March moved from the Forest Service to a new post at the FWS.
“My department was already short-staffed, and that’s why they hired me,” said Barnes during a call with reporters arranged by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), noting her review from last October found she was “exceeding expectations.” “This is absolutely turmoil for me. I’m navigating trying to find new work as a biologist, and I’m not seeing much in my immediate area.”
The consequences of these and other losses will likely take months if not years to unfold.
But in the days since the Trump administration began the job-cutting, led in part by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the abruptly unemployed have begun to talk. Here are some of their stories.
A biologist working on recovery
Tara Easter joined the FWS in February of 2024. She was almost out of her one-year probationary period when she got the bad news.
A biologist who had earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2023, with a thesis that examined the legal and illegal trade in freshwater turtles, Easter worked on endangered species issues from the FWS’s office in Vancouver, Washington.
On Friday morning, Feb. 14, Easter’s supervisor called at about 10:30 a.m. to tell her she was being fired.
“For me and a lot of people that I’ve talked to, these were not performance-based terminations,” Easter said in an interview. “It was a matter of timing. You know, I had one week left to go.”
Easter subsequently got what amounted to a form letter informing her that, as the letter put it, her “knowledge, skills and abilities do not meet the department’s current needs” and so it was “necessary and appropriate to terminate” her employment.
The cold termination language contrasted with the warm job reviews she had received, which Easter characterized as “wonderful.”
A 2012 graduate of North Carolina State University, Easter had picked up a Master of Science in biology from Boise State University before starting her doctoral work.
With the FWS, she was part of a team crafting status assessments and recovery plans for threatened and endangered species.
“These are not the highly charismatic or controversial species that typically get a lot of attention,” Easter said, “so I was working on things like crayfish and tropical plants.”
Her severance from the FWS came with a final paycheck, a payout for accrued vacation time and 31 days of continued health coverage. It did not come with confident feelings about the FWS’s continued ability to whittle away at an ESA backlog.
“It just is more work for the people who are left, who don’t necessarily have the time or the resources to get it done,” Easter said.
Managing the Denali kennels
Mitch Flanigan’s dog, Rupert, an 80-pound black Labrador mutt, led him to the NPS.
A Tennessee native, Flanigan worked construction before landing a spot as a white water rafting guide. That’s a warm-weather gig. Other guides would flip between rivers in the summer and ski resorts in the winter. Flanigan looked to do the same, but not many ski resorts allow an 80-pound dog in staff housing.
Dog sledding tours in Alaska did.
That’s how Flanigan first came to work at Denali National Park and Preserve, home to the only federal dog sled kennel. The park uses the dogs to get into wilderness areas during the frigid Alaskan winters, when roads are shut down and federal wilderness protections preclude using motorized vehicles. The sled teams ferry supplies, maintain the routes to backcountry cabins and support scientific researchers.
Flanigan was given a permanent job as assistant manager of the Denali kennels in December. He was fired in the Trump administration’s purge of probationary workers earlier this month. The move baffled Flanigan.
His job is designated as one of the park’s “essential” posts and because of that he was required to live on-site. Flanigan said he has the support of the park’s superintendent and all his supervisors.
“It didn’t seem to matter,” he said.
Flanigan has also been working at Denali for five years. But his current job is his first permanent position. It took five years of working seasonal posts at the kennels to get the experience he needed to earn the permanent job, he said.
Flanigan feels like that should have counted for something when the Interior Department let him go.
“If I needed experience to get the job, then I should be able to use that experience as leverage to keep the job,” Flanigan said.
He’s appealing his firing. Flanigan said he was let go via a form email that inaccurately blamed poor performance for his firing. The same language was sent to other probationary employees, according to emails viewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. Now he’s worried that the email could undermine any future efforts to work with the federal government, because his record has been tainted. In the meantime, he has 60 days to move out of NPS housing.
Rupert died several years ago. Flanigan and his partner have adopted a new dog, a retired musher from the Denali kennels named Steward.
A ‘dream job’ on public lands
For Victoria Moreno, what stands out about her nine months as a natural resource specialist at BLM is what could have been.
When Moreno was hired full-time last June at BLM’s Northwest Oregon District, after serving a year as a seasonal biological science technician, she called it her “dream job.” She says that from the time she was a teenager, her “long-term goal was to work in the public lands and public service.”
As a soils scientist, her primary mission was to work with a team that analyzed parcels for potential timber harvest. She analyzed soil conditions, and helped develop alternatives for logging projects before the parcel would go out for bid to contractors.
She loved landscape restoration work.
“I was working with our fish biologist to do stream restoration; I was working with our botanist to plan out restoration for unique botanical species that are in decline; I was working with our wildlife biologist for scouting areas to do beaver dam analog installations,” she said.
Moreno had proposed a number of projects, including comparing the soil microbial communities in protected old-growth forests versus forests managed more intensively for timber. Her supervisors seemed very supportive, and Moreno said she was starting to explore funding opportunities.
All that came crashing down at 2 p.m. Feb. 18 when her supervisor handed her a printed termination letter. The form letter asserted that her “knowledge, skills and abilities do not meet the department’s current needs,” and that it was “necessary and appropriate to terminate” her employment.
“I was told you need to turn in all your equipment and leave the premises by 5 p.m.,” she said. “So that gives me three hours to not be a mess, get my stuff together, and try to advocate for myself however I can while I still have access to my email, my employee profile, etc., etc.”
Moreno, 26, had the foresight to ask her supervisor to write a “close out” performance review. She said she was given high marks for her work — something that could come in handy as she prepares to find a new job.
“At this point, I’m just so angry because of the idea of what could have been,” she said. “There was so much potential there.”
A move to Nevada
Biologist Hayley Robinson bet on the federal government when she relocated to Las Vegas for a new job with the FWS.
She lost that hand.
One month and a day after Robinson started working on ESA issues in the agency’s Las Vegas office, she was abruptly fired along with two of her colleagues who shared her probationary status.
“One reason I was really excited about taking this position is I was hoping to expand my skills and become a more well-rounded biologist, get more familiar with the policy side of things, and get my foot in the door working for a federal agency,” Robinson said.
Besides, Robinson added, “a lot of people aim for federal work because it was supposed to be considered stable.”
In Robinson’s case, it was the government’s aim to hire her.
After participating in a FWS fellowship program while in graduate school, the Georgia native had an in with the agency. She was subsequently recruited by an FWS official to leave her job with the Illinois Natural History Survey and come to Las Vegas.
It was a real commitment, on everyone’s part. Robinson’s partner quit his job in Illinois to join her in the Nevada desert, and as part of the fellowship program the federal government paid about $20,000 in relocation costs.
“We intentionally dropped everything and moved 1,700 miles before my partner’s job was done, and before we felt really ready,” Robinson said, “but we were just trying to make it work. And so it was really tough when, a month into us committing, now I’m unemployed.”
A 2019 graduate of Georgia Southern University, Robinson had earned a master’s degree from the University of Georgia. There, she studied the relationship between fish and freshwater mussels in the state’s Flint River.
In Las Vegas, she was working on ESA consultations and was about to start helping with the big backlog of FWS scientific permit applications. With the shrunken staff, Robinson said, this work will go even slower.
Still, this week, Robinson is at the annual meeting of the Desert Tortoise Council at a Las Vegas casino, casting for new opportunities.
“On a personal level, I’m really worried, because a lot of my background was related to fisheries,” Robinson said. “Now, I’m a fish person who is living in the desert. There’s not a lot of fisheries stuff going on here.”
A two-year fellowship cut short
When Annelise Waling landed her post in the White Mountain National Forest in 2023, she said it felt like “a perfect fit.”
She came to the post in New Hampshire after earning her master’s degree in hydrology at the University of New Hampshire, and earlier, a bachelor’s in geology from Clemson University in South Carolina.
“All I want to do at the end of the day,” Waling said, “is positively benefit our society and the environment.”
During her brief tenure with the Forest Service — her two-year term as a Presidential Management Fellow started in summer 2023 before being cut short earlier this month — Waling said she had plenty of opportunities to pursue those goals.
Her work focused on protecting the water and aquatic resources in the 800,000-acre forest, such as analyzing flood estimates and recommending how bridges and culverts could be built to better utilize tax dollars.
“I was finding that the software that we use to estimate those floods really does not show how big our floods are,” she said, noting that her research showed that current modeling relied on data for the entire state of New Hampshire, which can vary significantly from the forest lands, and underestimate potential flows.
Waling said she was also developing a new snow monitoring program, to provide significantly more data about the forest than is currently available.
While Waling is now looking for a new post in New Hampshire, she said she would be happy to return to the federal government.
“If by some miracle my position was reinstated, I feel pretty confident I’d go running back despite the current turmoil in our office,” she said.
A popular program
Even as the Trump administration began to slash federal jobs, some hoped that NPS employees working on the Land and Water Conservation Fund might be spared.
After all, the program — established in 1965 and funded by offshore oil and gas drilling proceeds, rather than taxpayer dollars — has long been popular on Capitol Hill. President Donald Trump himself signed off on a bill in his first term guaranteeing the program full, annual funding.
“We thought our program was politically pretty safe,” said Brooke Sausser, who served as a LWCF program officer in Colorado.
But just a few months into her post, Sausser was among those terminated on Valentine’s Day. She described it as a frustrating experience, even as she praised her direct managers for providing her with positive reviews.
“There’s this big myth that we were fired for poor performance when that was so far from the truth,” Sausser said. “It was not their choice, and it was not about me.”
Sausser, who said she was inspired to seek a job focused on public lands by a childhood visit to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, wants the public to understand how the LWCF shapes outdoor recreation across urban and rural communities, as well as red and blue states alike.
“I can all but guarantee you’ve been to a park funded by the Land and Water Conservation Fund,” Sausser said, noting there are some 46,000 parks funded by the program nationwide.
She said she is worried that the popular program could falter without the program officers who administer funds to state and local partners and guard against waste, fraud and abuse.
“Without the staff there to administer these programs, you’re going to have millions of dollars’ worth of projects that are going to struggle to move forward,” she said.
Providing access to data
Amelia Kreiter started work in January as a Minneapolis-based USGS social scientist. Soon, she was doomscrolling Reddit.
Along with untold numbers of other anxious federal employees, Kreiter said she began habitually checking the online social platform for news or gossip about DOGE’s wholesale slashing of jobs.
“There were just so many rumors flying around,” Kreiter said in an interview. “I had been feeling a little better for a couple days, and then on the morning of Feb. 14, there was just this huge sweep of terminations, and around 2 o’clock, I got a Teams meeting invite from my boss, and so I was like, ‘OK, this is it.’”
Just three weeks into her new job, Kreiter was given 90 minutes to clear out; with the rush, she said she still has not received her official termination letter.
A 2015 graduate of the University of Minnesota, Kreiter stayed at the school to earn a master’s and Ph.D. in natural resources science and management. During her brief time with the USGS Water Resources Mission Area, she was starting work on a database to ease access to social science data.
She believed in the work, and she respected the USGS — as did, she said, other scientists of her generation.
“With such messed up natural resources and such a messed up climate, we want to see results of our work and do something that lands outside of an academic journal paywall,” Kreiter said.
Even with notoriously slow-moving bureaucracies, she added, “you still do get to see the results of the work you’ve done in the real world.”
With so many government scientists now tossed back into the job market all at once, Kreiter said she expected that her upcoming job search will be challenging. She noted, however, the same could be said for the scientists who survived the cut
“The people that I left behind there, I still think are great scientists, and hopefully they can do great work in the future,” Kreiter said. “But I think at the moment, everyone feels pretty handcuffed as to the work they can do.”
A sought-after career
When the Trump administration slashed the federal workforce’s newest hires to cut costs, it fired a carnivore biologist working at Yosemite National Park whose salary was covered by an outside group.
The nonprofit Yosemite Conservancy provided the funding for Andria Townsend’s position at the renowned California park.
Townsend, who was raised in Chicago by a single mom before moving West and falling in love with open spaces, sees her firing as evidence that the Trump administration wasn’t focused on saving money or improving efficiency.
“This is just a step that they’re taking to try to destabilize federal agencies so that they can A., employ Trump loyalists to work for them, and B., so that they can privatize things like public land,” she said.
For Townsend personally, it has meant the end of a long sought-after career.
Before the NPS, Townsend worked as a wildlife biologist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. But she said the draw of the NPS, for many scientists, is that their work is purely about conserving species and protecting wildlife. When she worked for the state, the underlying purpose of the job was to manage wildlife populations for hunters and anglers. When she worked for a land trust before that, the underlying industry was real estate.
Townsend said she was let go despite having good performance reviews. Now Townsend’s mourning what’s lost.
“I had good health insurance for the first time in my entire f— life. And I had maternity leave if I ever decided to have kids. I had retirement for the first time in my life,” she said. “Those jobs, they’re good jobs to have, and it really sucks to work really hard to get it, to have it illegally taken away from me.”
A job offer rescinded
Kristin Jenn considers herself a “natural Pollyanna” because she often believes that things are gonna turn out OK.
True to form, when Trump froze new hiring for federal jobs in January, Jenn didn’t panic. She’d recently been hired as a NPS ranger, after two consecutive summers getting a foot in the door by taking seasonal posts. A former member of the Air Force Air National Guard who did a tour in Iraq, she had been hired under a special designation that prioritizes federal work for military veterans
But her optimism didn’t pan out.
Several days after Trump took office, and just two weeks after the federal government had offered her a job, Jenn received notice that the offer had been rescinded.
“I thought maybe my veteran status would protect me,” she said in an interview. “It was utter joy to utter devastation in two weeks.”
The parks were meant to be a new beginning for Jenn.
She grew up in a small farm community in Iowa and joined the Air National Guard out of high school. The military would take Jenn overseas, nourishing a lifelong travel bug. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Jenn’s unit was called up in 2003 and she served in the Iraq War.
When she returned, Jenn left military service and became a tour guide in the U.S. and Canada. The job often revolved around national parks, which she adored. But a decade later, Jenn felt like she was catering to the privileged. She went to seminary, and in 2016 earned a master’s degree in Christian leadership. But after leaving school, she became disillusioned with the state of modern Christianity and found herself looking again for a new path.
“I was like, ‘OK, you’re halfway through your career. You’re 45. You’re middle-aged. … What do you want to do with your time?’” she recalled.
The answer would be the NPS. Jenn took a summer job at Denali National Park in 2023 and then again in the summer of 2024. The first time she did a demonstration of the park’s sled dogs, looking out at a crowd of roughly 300 people of all ages and backgrounds, she felt an epiphany, like she’d found her purpose.
Even though she was living in a bunkhouse and sharing a bathroom, she wanted this work to be her life.
When Jenn’s job offer fell through in January — Jenn asked that E&E News not name the park, because she hopes to work there in the future — she decided to again take stock of her options. She’s not sure what’s next. She may go back to Iowa, to stay in the spare bedrooms of friends or family.
“It’s basically a gird-your-loins time,” she said.
