Owen Liu was hired to help solve a mystery.
Fishers had been plying the Pacific Ocean in search of hake, a species making up one of the most lucrative fisheries on the West Coast.
But the catch hadn’t met expectations for a decade, Liu said.
Liu was tapped last year to unravel the conundrum. He was developing a tool to help understand Pacific hake distribution — before being fired by the Trump administration along with more than 600 other National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration probationary employees.
Since then, Liu and his fired colleagues have been caught up in political turmoil, which has landed in federal court and led to rehirings and refirings as recently as last week.
In interviews with The Seattle Times, some of these Western Washington NOAA fisheries scientists described feeling like they’d been in “limbo” or “purgatory” and expressed a desire to get back to work.
Nineteen probationary employees who worked at the Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Science centers have been among those hanging in the balance, according to Nick Tolimieri, a union representative for local NOAA employees. There are about 400 people in the bargaining unit across the science centers, Tolimieri said.
The scientists who shared their stories inform and set salmon fisheries quotas and identify priority salmon habitat recovery work. They were hired to forecast climate impacts, like low-oxygen conditions and marine heat, on fisheries and provide data to reduce the risk of whale entanglements, among other things.
The loss of staff comes at a time when climate change is fueling a higher degree of uncertainty for fisheries managers and the fishing communities who depend on them. A study published last week found opportunities to make fish populations and fishing communities more resilient to climate impacts, but authors of the paper say deep cuts to NOAA may jeopardize those opportunities.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A NOAA fisheries spokesperson said the agency could not discuss “internal personnel and management matters” and “remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public …”
At the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Montlake, scientists are taking on additional work as contracts with janitorial, maintenance and other services lapsed because of Trump administration actions.
They lost their only oceanographer — someone who can untangle complex ocean environmental patterns — and picking up the responsibilities of their other terminated colleagues would require reducing or losing additional services they provide.
The Alaska and Northwest Fisheries Science centers and the two fishery management councils they advise are global leaders in developing sustainable approaches to fisheries management, said Bill Tweit, who represents Washington on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.
“That’s in jeopardy,” he said.
Living in a holding pattern
Liu grew up in New England and fell in love with the ocean at a young age, spending his summers on the coast.
He chose a career in the U.S. government because he liked that the research could have an immediate impact.
“I was getting a little tired of the ivory tower (in academia). You can have the best idea in the world and no one will ever hear about it, except the five people that read your really complicated paper,” Liu said.
He came to Washington a few months before the COVID-19 shutdowns and began working for NOAA under a contract. When the Inflation Reduction Act made more funding available for fisheries research, Liu was hired for a full-time role.
His team was intended to help bring some of NOAA’s work into the 21st century — making new tools available to better predict the movement and size of fish populations, among other things. Their work, using state-of-the-art climate models, was intended to make fisheries more sustainable and protect endangered species.
Liu’s responsibilities included figuring out what was going on with the Pacific hake fishery. Over the past few years, the population assessment has shown the fish are doing well, but the fishers haven’t been able to find them, pulling in just 30% to 40% of the allowable harvest.
“Enter me, a spatial modeler, where my job has been to take all of the data and the research from the survey, from the various American and Canadian fisheries, and bring that all to bear to try to understand why and where the hake stock is distributed,” he said.
Liu said he had finally gotten to a point where he had all of the data together, some strong hypotheses and support from treaty managers to move forward.
Just like creating a seasonal weather outlook, Liu said, one of his team’s jobs was to build a system to predict when and where there may be a high risk for whale entanglement and provide that information to states to help reduce those risks.
In late February, he was fired.
On March 17, he and other probationary employees received a letter stating that an order issued by a federal judge in Maryland required them to be reinstated to a paid, nonduty status “until such time as this litigation is resolved or the Department of Commerce determines to take other administrative action with respect to your employment.”
“I feel like I’ve just been kind of living in this holding pattern,” Liu said last week.
Liu said he and others who were reinstated on leave didn’t regain access to their email accounts, work servers or equipment. Some received letters after their reinstatement acknowledging that their health insurance had lapsed.
On Thursday, they received another letter stating the restraining order “is no longer in effect,” and they were terminated again.
Fishery experts
Darren Pilcher worked as a NOAA affiliate for a decade.
He studied the relationship between changing acidity conditions and red king crab population abundance in the Bering Sea, which became a pipeline for his position at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center. He was hired alongside Liu.
Pilcher and Liu’s team, the Climate Ecosystem Fisheries Initiative, aimed to develop an understanding of how ocean conditions are changing and better forecast impacts on fisheries. The headliner of this work, Pilcher said, was the new ocean models.
Pilcher, as the only oceanographer at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, helped test the models to provide the best scientific information available to the Pacific Fisheries Management Council and others to help set harvest quotas and other targets.
The work had direct connections to the multibillion-dollar West Coast fishing industries, the communities and the jobs it supports, Pilcher said.
“It was kind of like this great culmination of this arc that I had been on for nearly a decade,” Pilcher said of being hired full time. “It was exciting.”
The past few weeks, Pilcher said, felt like living in a state of “purgatory,” and he didn’t know if or when he may be fired again.
Mark Baltzell accepted a role with NOAA after two decades with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, most recently as the state salmon and steelhead manager.
Baltzell worked on a team of about a half a dozen overseeing regulatory work for Puget Sound, the Columbia River, coastal Washington, Oregon and California. The group includes data scientists and biologists who help complete technical analyses and write reports on potential impacts on endangered species and other issues.
This is the time of year that tribes and states are trying to put salmon seasons in place. There’s usually a lot of late nights looking at numbers and trying to negotiate fisheries back and forth. They are now missing two salmon staff who would normally be at these meetings, Baltzell said.
“I spent a lot of my career caring about salmon and caring about the resource and the people involved. And to put it frankly, this is all a bunch of (expletive).”
All in doubt
David Troutt, the longtime natural resources director with the Nisqually Tribe, recalled the day the cuts began. He saw about a dozen NOAA scientists lose their jobs during a lunch break in a meeting between fisheries managers from tribal nations and NOAA.
For Troutt, it raises the question: Are they going to be able to get the permits in place before the first spring Chinook fisheries start?
It’s unclear how the cuts may eventually affect hatcheries’ ability to release young Chinook salmon that help sustain fisheries and feed the endangered southern resident killer whales.
It’ll become clear in the next few weeks what the impact is on fishing seasons, Troutt said, and by summer, what the impact is going to be on hatcheries.
“All of this is up in the air,” Troutt said. “It’s all in doubt.”
