By Coral Davenport and Chris Cameron
The Trump administration fired about 1,300 additional employees at the Interior Department over the holiday weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter, adding to the widespread purge of thousands of federal workers with probationary status that began last week.
The Trump administration had also fired about 1,000 employees at the National Park Service, according to workers groups, bringing the total number of layoffs at the Interior Department to roughly 2,300.
The firings affected many agencies that oversee public lands controlled by the federal government and are managed by the Interior Department.
Some of those agencies focus on areas that President Donald Trump has made policy priorities. Trump said last week that he had directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to undo a Biden-era ban on offshore drilling, and he has in recent weeks fixated on water supply issues that plagued the response to recent wildfires in California.
Among those fired over the weekend were workers at the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in parched Western states, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which has long overseen offshore drilling, and, more recently, offshore wind farms.
The cuts also included people from the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the conservation and use of public land.
The cuts included about 240 people from the U.S. Geological Survey, which monitors natural hazards like volcanoes and earthquakes but is also one of the nation’s premier agencies for climate research.
“USGS touches American lives every day, they just don’t know it, because so much of it is operating in the background,” said Mark Sogge, a former research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. For example, Sogge said the agency operates a national stream gauge system that alerts communities to floods and affects water deliveries to cities and farms.
“The things we’ve seen with floods in North Carolina — this is the alert system for that,” he said. “And maintaining this system is just the kind of thing that these new, young probationary people are doing.”
The Interior Department’s press office did not respond Tuesday afternoon to emailed requests for comment.
Firings of probationary workers continued to cascade through the government Tuesday. More than 10% of the workforce at the National Science Foundation, an independent agency that supports cutting-edge scientific research, were laid off adding to the widespread purge of federal workers with probationary status that began last week.
Michael England, a spokesperson for the foundation, said in a statement that the agency fired 168 probationary employees, and that it “had approximately 1,450 career employees prior to the cuts.”
But two NSF employees with knowledge of the matter disputed that all those fired on Tuesday were on probation. The employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said that only about half of the layoffs were of probationary staff, and the other half affected more senior specialists with deep levels of expertise in areas like engineering, biology, computer science, geology and chemistry. When asked about the dispute, England said in an email he had no further comment.
The Trump administration ordered agencies last week to terminate most of an estimated 200,000 government workers on probation, and mass firings began to cascade through the government, with some departments laying off more than 1,000 employees at a time. Other agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Defense Department, are preparing to lay off potentially thousands of employees this week.
Workers on probation do not receive the same protections that many other federal employees have. Probationary periods tend to last a year, but they can be longer for certain positions.
Over the weekend, cuts targeting scientists and public health officials rattled through the civil service. An estimated 1,200 employees at the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, have already been dismissed. Employees at the NSF were told earlier this month to expect a total reduction in its workforce of 25% to 50%, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly.
The NSF and the NIH are the two cornerstones of public research funding in the United States. The NSF focuses on nonmedical scientific research, supporting advanced research on quantum computing, artificial intelligence, observation of outer space, and the creation of new advanced materials used in electronics.
The list of scientific breakthroughs accomplished with NSF funding is expansive, but the foundation has supported the development of inventions like the internet, smartphones, MRI scanning, LASIK eye surgery, 3D printing, kidney transplants, lithium-ion batteries, radar, LED lights and even the language learning app Duolingo.
Staff at the Food and Drug Administration’s food science lab were scrambling to keep experiments moving forward on Tuesday after about 50 staff members were let go over the weekend with no plan to hand off studies, according to a person familiar with the work.
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