When Cristen Don got word she had been laid off from her job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Newport last week, she had an hour to clear her desk.
“It was totally black box,” she said of the layoff on Thursday.
Though Don had been at NOAA for only three months, she had spent 18 years at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Still, she was on a list of probationary workers, which she was notified about four weeks ago.
For the two weeks before she was terminated, Don said, she hadn’t been able to work on a project that would take her more than a day, since there was no guarantee she would be around the next day.
Don isn’t a researcher, she said Tuesday, “but my role was to work with the leadership team on strategic planning and I was leading a process to actually improve budget planning and allocation process, so we could be more nimble and strategic when things like big budget cuts come.”
She also supports researchers, she said, to make sure their work is aligned with national priorities and direction from Congress.
“My work was very much about making NOAA more efficient,” she said. “So, it’s a little bit ironic.”
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Don is one of an unknown number of probationary NOAA employees who were laid off last week during a purge by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, created by President Donald Trump.
NOAA has not released the number of people who lost jobs on Thursday but has instead said repeatedly, in statements from various officials a variation of, “It is our longstanding practice not to comment on personnel issues or speculate on the impacts.
Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden said Tuesday he had not been able to get numbers from the Trump administration about how many people had been fired.
“As it’s been with each of this administration’s chaos-inducing schemes, answers to even the most fundamental questions like how many federal employees have been illegally forced out either aren’t forthcoming or shift with the day,” Wyden said in a statement.
Those laid off include new hires with long job histories, like Don, and employees who were promoted or given permanent positions in the last year.
While Don could not say exactly how many people in the Newport offices lost their jobs last week, she said at least two other women in her office were packing up Thursday afternoon.
The job losses cover a spectrum of NOAA Fisheries duties.
“We do all the research off of Washington, Oregon and also in Idaho to support sustainable fisheries, seafood safety, human health, such as monitoring harmful algal blooms,” Don said.
Don believes Thursday’s job cuts at Northwest Fisheries Science Center will have far-ranging impacts.
“It means not collecting the data that’s needed to understand our fish populations, which is going to affect fishery management decisions and it’s going to slow that whole process down, which will have rippling effects affecting our commercial and recreational fisheries,” she said.
But that’s just the beginning.
“We work on seafood safety to make sure seafood is healthy,” Don said. “Also, we do enforcement to make sure the seafood that’s on your plate is what it says it is.”
Illegal labeling, she said, is a real problem in the seafood industry. Without enforcement, you will be less sure about the accuracy of seafood packaging.
And then, there are the harmful algal blooms, which Northwest Fisheries Science Center monitors. Harmful algal blooms can kill animals and sicken humans.
Those problems aren’t just health risks, they could harm the coastal economies, Don said.
“I’m not an expert, but I do look at a lot of economic data and work with a lot of economists and I am concerned that this will have a local impact,” she said.
Wyden agrees.
“These unconstitutional and devastating cuts slam the Newport economy and reverberate throughout Oregon by undermining forecasting capabilities for wildfires, severe storms and floods,” he said.
“I saw firsthand during my visit to NOAA last year in Newport just how hardworking and essential these federal employees are,” Wyden said, “and I’ll fight like hell to reverse these shortsighted and irresponsible cuts by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their uninformed acolytes.”
Don is fighting back too. About 30 minutes after receiving her termination notice on Thursday afternoon, she sent an email to her supervisors contesting the firing. In that email, she wrote that the justification provided for her layoff — that her “ability, knowledge, and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs” — is “inconsistent with my professional background and performance.‘”
“While my response wasn’t a formal appeal,” she said, “since affected employees are still working to understand what official appeal options are available — it was the best I could put together in about 15 minutes while packing up my office.”
— Lizzy Acker covers Oregon weather and writes the advice column Why Tho? Reach her at 503-221-8052, lacker@oregonian.com. Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.
