Morgan Saladino was at work in the Anchorage field office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Anchorage when she got the news. Saladino helped manage the observer program, which puts scientists onto fishing boats to monitor their catch. She says she was reviewing data that a scientist had collected when she saw the email.
“I got that firing email in the middle of that debriefing interview, and I had to tell them, you know, to go sit in the other room,” she said.
Saladino is one of around 880 probationary NOAA employees around the country who were fired last month as part of a wider effort by the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team within the federal government.
The NOAA cuts include 13 positions at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which conducts research used to manage federal fisheries off Alaska’s coasts. A federal judge on Thursday ruled that the Trump administration must reinstate thousands of probationary employees who were laid off from several federal agencies, but the ruling did not name the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA. The status of those fired workers remains in limbo.
The Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which studies and helps oversee Alaska’s marine resources, may have lost more than 5% of its staff at once, with more layoffs looming. That’s fueling worries about NOAA’s ability to effectively support the industry, which is the state’s second-largest economic driver after oil.
‘We’re losing a lot of manpower’
Saladino noted that two of the three employees in her office, the fisheries observer program, were terminated.
“We're losing a lot of manpower,” Saladino said. “Our field office has completely lost the ability to support observers and evaluate their data.”
“Evaluating this data for accuracy and compliance and proper procedure is incredibly important because it's used directly in stock management and for the vessels, for industry, to ensure that we have healthy populations, to ensure that fishing can be maintained year to year,” she added.
Nick Tolimieri is the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 8A, which represents most of the Alaska fishery service employees. He said at least 13 of them were fired, but that figure only includes union members, so the actual number could be higher.
Tolimieri said the cuts come at a challenging time for the organization.
“We’re already at a point where we're kind of strained,” he said. “We don't quite have enough staff to do everything they want already. So if we get ripped, a lot of those things are just going to fall apart.”
The layoffs targeted probationary staff, which are mostly employees with under a year at the agency but may also include staff who have transferred to a new department, been reassigned or promoted to supervisory roles.
Tolimieri stressed that probationary employees are not necessarily inexperienced. And the majority of them have PhDs and master’s degrees.
“You're talking about highly qualified people who had to go through an intense selection process,” he said. “The Northwest Center lost a woman who was a presidential fellow. Top of the line scientist.”
He also worries the layoffs could disrupt NOAA’s ability to complete crucial fieldwork in the future.
“You have an aging population of survey scientists and stock assessment people and other ecologists. And the probationary people were all younger, early career scientists who are bringing new skill sets and a lot of energy to the system,” Tolimieri said.
‘How are they going to even open a fishery?’
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the Trump administration was implementing a new round of layoffs at NOAA, which would further reduce the organization’s workforce by about 25%.
The layoffs align with the vision of Project 2025, a document published by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2023 that outlines a game plan for an incoming conservative president. Trump has distanced himself publicly from the blueprint, but many of his policies align with its recommendations, including the NOAA cuts.
Project 2025 called NOAA "one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry," and said the agency’s mission was “harmful to American prosperity.”
But many in the seafood business see NOAA as critical to ensuring their industry’s financial success. Frank Kelty works as the fisheries consultant for the largest commercial fishing port in the nation, Alaska’s Dutch Harbor. He said NOAA’s programs are crucial.
“How are they going to even open a fishery if they don't have any information on what it's going to do?” he said.
One example is the trawl survey, an annual assessment of marine health. Research vessels spend months travelling across fishing grounds and surveying fish stocks. Fishery managers then use that information to set things like catch limits.
A current NOAA employee who was not permitted to speak publicly and requested to remain anonymous said the cuts have come at the “worst possible time” for the fisheries service, and that a recent spending freeze on employee purchase cards has created more problems for preparing for the trawl surveys, which next take place this summer. NOAA starts mobilizing the vessels in the spring. The employee said the credit freeze has made it hard to do things like buy equipment and prepare boats for the surveys.
Kelty said the industry has already seen what can happen if the surveys don’t go forward. He pointed to 2020, when pandemic restrictions wiped the surveys out. Scientists did not know that snow crab populations were crashing, which caused major turmoil in the multi-million dollar snow crab fishery.
“During the COVID year, we had no survey at all on groundfish and crab, and it was a very difficult situation, especially on crab,” he said. “When they went and did the next year's survey, there was no snow crab, and we didn't have any heads up that we were going to have an issue with the stock.”
Morgan Saladino, who lost her job in Anchorage, emphasized how closely the fishery service and commercial fishing are entwined.
“Industry, they like to say that they hate us because we're a regulatory agency and we make their life more difficult,” she said. “But when it comes down to it, I think we all realize that we depend on each other.”
