Some federal workers in Juneau were fired again this month after the Supreme Court declined to reverse the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce. This comes after the employees were fired earlier this year, then reinstated last month.
The federal workforce is a mainstay for Southeast Alaska’s economy. According to numbers from Southeast Conference, a regional economic development organization, more than 2,000 federal jobs brought in nearly $200 million in earnings in 2023. In Juneau, the federal government is the second largest employer after the state with 709 workers, according to city data from last year.
Aaron Lambert was a fisheries management specialist at NOAA’s Alaska Regional Office in Juneau when he was part of the national wave of terminations in February. He was reinstated and put on administrative leave, with pay, in March when a U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled that the firings at several agencies were illegal.
But Lambert was fired again on April 10.
He said his supervisors didn’t know until he told them, and he hasn’t received a separation package yet.
“It’s tough to make decisions right now,” Lambert said. “I honestly feel a little bit lost.”
He’s 41 years old. His wife works for the state and his young daughter goes to day care in the Federal Building downtown, where his former office is.
Lambert said he’s picked up some work through the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Curry Cunningham’s Juneau-based lab where he did his graduate research, but has taken a 50% pay cut.
“Being back at the university, most of the graduate students there were hoping to get federal jobs in the future, whether it’s at NOAA or Fish and Wildlife Service or something similar to that — and the mood there is really not good,” he said. “People aren’t feeling great about their decision to go into science.”
In addition to the local economic effects of losing federal jobs, there are physical impacts when work goes undone. At NOAA, Lambert’s job was to estimate how many salmon are in Southcentral’s Cook Inlet, and how many need to reproduce each year to support a sustainable fishery.
He said that without enough staff monitoring fish stocks, “certain fisheries may not open, or decisions might be made on information that’s not complete or that’s old, and so it could affect how well we sustainably harvest fisheries.”
Federal agencies are also losing support staff, like Taylee Escalante. She was an administrative assistant at the National Weather Service forecast office in Juneau, where she was born and raised. Like Lambert, she was fired in February, reinstated in March, and fired again this month.
“It really sucks, feeling like I finally got a really good job, and … it’s not my own fault for it getting taken away,” she said.
She processed payroll and helped manage the budget, and said her job included finding ways for the office to save money.
About 95% of the land in Southeast is federally owned. Robert Venables, the executive director of Southeast Conference, said that influences every economic sector here, including recreation, timber, mining and energy development.
“We’ve seen the president say it’s a priority of his administration to make the natural resources more readily available — and it’s going to take federal personnel to do that,” Venables said. “You have to have specialized employees to be able to permit, oversee, manage and support the priorities that the federal government has stated.”
The Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of the firings issued by the Trump administration, leaving that to be decided in lower courts where cases are pending. Federal agencies have not released a tally of the workers who were fired, nor have they reported reinstatements or re-firings.
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