Scientists behind some of the most important breakthroughs in Northwest scientific research over the past two decades have left their jobs in the wake of budget cutting by the Trump administration.
The federal government has terminated science experiments, canceled research contracts, set spending limits for travel and purchases to $1 and created uncertainty at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, a flagship of scientific research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That has led to senior scientists working at the center and elsewhere to take early retirement buyouts and leave their posts in recent days, citing untenable working conditions, some of the scientists said in interviews about why they left.
The science center has lost about 30 people, according to Nick Tolimieri, president of the fisheries chapter of the IFPTE Local 8A (a union leader for about 200 center employees in the bargaining unit). While science still continues at the center, many of those lost were scientists with significant experience.
The Trump administration had offered buyouts to agency staff to encourage early retirements as it seeks to cut the federal workforce. NOAA spokesperson James Miller declined to discuss the early retirements, citing “internal personnel and management matters.”
“NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” Miller said in an email.
Options to take early retirement, finalized last week, represent the loss of thousands of hours of research expertise honed in the Northwest’s rivers and urban streams, and probing the lives of the most revered wildlife species, including salmon and southern resident orcas.
The Times interviewed five of these scientists.
An agency in turmoil
For most, these retirements cut short careers that the scientists intended to continue.
“This is definitely ahead of schedule,” said Barre, who devoted 25 years to federal service, understanding the lives of the southern residents and leading NOAA’s recovery program for orcas. Seattle Branch Chief for the Protected Resources Division for NOAA’s West Coast Region, Barre felt the risk to her job, suddenly unstable, was too great to remain.
“This was a difficult decision to leave work that is so important to me, and so important in the world, and such talented and dedicated colleagues and amazing partners,” Barre said.
The uncertainty went beyond her own security in the job, to the agency’s ability to continue endangered species recovery work, Barre said. “We have yet to understand where some of the work I was doing fits into the priorities of this new administration.
“The idea that all regulations are a problem or negative or bad is not the way we have operated.”
So many early retirements all at once were combined with terminations of provisional employees, many of whom were new blood the agency needs, Barre said. “There are a lot of losses of institutional knowledge, and we also lost a lot of early career managers with that new fresh energy and perspective.”
Ford, who revealed so much about the family tree of the southern residents, said he is concerned for the agency’s future. “I feel sad that the agency I have worked for for nearly three decades is suffering in this way,” Ford said. “I feel particularly bad for the people who are earlier in their career and I think were really hoping to make a career in doing science to support natural resource conservation.
“There are a lot of question marks over that now.”
“Very much unfinished”
Nat Scholz in a 2020 paper with other scientists determined the chemical in tire rubber, a preservative, that is killing coho in urban streams. His has been a crusading career, working with collaborators to carefully understand the problem of coho prespawn mortality.
Scholz was the lead author in a 2011 paper that showed coho death was routine in urban streams. They joined with other scientists who documented that filtration through soil can help the problem, purifying the water. Scholz and another team documented in their 2017 paper the link to traffic volume on roads and even mapped the scope of the problem across an estimated 40% of Puget Sound country.
He took early retirement reluctantly. “It became untenable; we just can’t do the work,” Scholz said. Two other principal investigators on his team quit the same day. “The programs we have been involved with for decades have been mothballed.”
It pains him particularly because threats to salmon in urban streams are only intensifying, with new chemicals, more development and habitat destruction, and climate change, which lowers and heats stream flows — concentrating pollutants and stressing fish.
“What is it going to take to have salmon and people living side by side, not only now but into the future generations, that is where science comes into play. … Who is going to carry that forward?” Scholz said. “Who can step up and fill the void? … I feel the work we have ahead of us is very much unfinished, we were at the peak of our careers.”
Belt-tightening or ideology?
Morley, the stream food web expert, said that unlike the others, she was thinking about taking her career in a new direction when all this happened, and so opted for early retirement. But she grieves not only the loss of expertise at the science center built over decades, but budget cuts that shut down recruitment of young people into the field.
Interns from Native nations were just about to begin their summer work, in a hopeful program intended to build trust with a new generation of learners not well represented in the sciences. It felt to her like an unnecessary and particularly painful act, Morley said, at an agency working hard to build trust. “It’s yanked out from under them a week before they are supposed to start.”
A tribal resource web page also was taken down. “We were really working to rebuild trust which wasn’t there for good reason,” Morley said.
“I feel a lot of grief for everything that is getting lost right now, all the species we are going to lose, and all the species that are going to suffer, and the communities.”
Many of the retired scientists are now seeking to continue their work — as volunteers, if the paperwork needed to do so will be approved by new leaders at NOAA, Morley said. But will it? To her these budget cuts weren’t about reducing spending at all, but shutting down the science itself, making their work, even done for free, unwelcome.
“These cuts have nothing to do with saving money,” she said. “It is about silencing people and destroying science.”
Staff reporter Isabella Breda contributed to this story.
