Ex-NOAA workers Rebecca Howard, former research fish biologist, Dennis Jaszka (top left), former Investigative support technician, and Mark Baltzell, former fishery management specialist, recently spoke about their job losses with media. Office of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray
Mark Baltzell had seen the writing on the wall, but that didn’t make losing his dream job easy.
Baltzell knew that he might get swept up in the flurry of federal firings executed by the administration of President Donald Trump. A single dad in Olympia, he’d worked in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a fishery management specialist, teaming up with tribes and states on managing salmon and steelhead fisheries on the West Coast.
Then on Feb. 27, Baltzell received a termination email.
“I had 68 minutes to pack my office and walk away,” Baltzell said Thursday. “The email was the same email that was sent to hundreds of my fellow employees.”
Baltzell was one of four former NOAA workers who shared their stories during a March 13 press conference hosted by U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat. In recent weeks, Murray has sounded the alarm about the mass federal layoffs — terminations that critics have classified as unnecessary, dangerous and cruel.
Such firings have reached the federal workforce in the Pacific Northwest, including folks who’d been employed with the National Parks Service, the Bonneville Power Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Roughly 650 NOAA employees have been dismissed without reason, Murray said Thursday, including dozens in Washington state. Another round of expected cuts could target an additional 1,000-plus NOAA employees as part of actions taken by Trump and X owner Elon Musk, de facto head of the new federal Department of Government Efficiency.
In the weeks leading up to his termination, Baltzell was preparing himself for the worst. And although he wasn’t surprised when he got the email, he was still sad and angry to have his job taken away — not for performance reasons, but because of seemingly arbitrary decisions made by “an unelected bureaucrat in D.C.”
“It’s a tough pill to swallow when you know none of the reasons for your termination were legal or right,” Baltzell said.
What’s at stake with the NOAA cuts?
NOAA employs more than 700 people in Washington, according to Murray’s office. The agency provides key weather forecasts and helps protect marine resources critical to the state’s culture and economy.
Batzell noted that tens of millions of federal dollars are funneled through NOAA for salmon recovery, monitoring, habitat restoration and hatchery improvements, as well as supporting tribal fisheries. The future of that funding is at risk.
Rick Spinrad also recently lost his job as a NOAA administrator under the Trump cuts. He said the loss of qualified NOAA employees could lead to eliminated or degraded forecasts, including for extreme weather watches, seasonal flood outlooks and tsunami warnings.
Then there could be commercial fishing closures and the shuttering of critical salmon hatcheries, hurting a $320-billion-annual industry, Spinrad said. Delivery of some goods and products at the ports could be delayed or even canceled because of “compromised abilities to map the harbors and sea lanes for safe navigation.”
“American lives will be threatened, property damaged and economic losses incurred in virtually every business sector, every geographic region of the country and every component of American society,” Spinrad said.
‘Very dark clouds coming’
When a wildfire flares up, NOAA’s National Weather Service deploys incident meteorologists who offer on-site support. Murray explained that they’ll notify firefighters about wind direction, for instance, helping to predict where the fire will spread.
NOAA also tracks critical climate-change data, Murray said. Sea-Tac airport pilots and boat captains consult agency-supplied information to prepare for safe travel. And Yakima Valley farmers rely on its seasonal outlooks for crop advice, affecting consumers’ groceries too.
Today’s forecast, she added, “warns of very dark clouds coming if Trump and Musk do not reverse this course and reverse the unthinkable damage they are doing to NOAA.”
In one case, a NOAA employee-of-the-year had been fired because she was recently promoted, Murray said. A few years back that employee had aided orcas by diverting them away from a San Juan Island-adjacent oil spill.
Many folks might not realize how important NOAA is, Murray said. But they’ll feel it when their weather report is less accurate — or when a fire blazes and “there’s nobody there at the site.”
“What I’m trying to do right now is raise the specter, have people understand it, and to raise their voices and to let their members of Congress know we need this information back,” the senator said. “It’s critical to us, our safety, our security and our way of life.”