By Mya Trujillo
Four months ago, Dr. Holden Harris was leading a team of scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC). Now, he sells frozen chocolate bananas on the beach in Florida.
Harris was one of the approximately 880 NOAA employees laid off on Feb. 27 as a result of cuts made by the Trump administration to multiple federal agencies. The former research biologist received an email from NOAA’s Deputy Under Secretary for Operations Vice Admiral Nancy Han, at 4 p.m. that day, stating that at 5 p.m., he would be officially terminated.
“The last email I got from Vice Admiral Han was just a couple of months before that, where she congratulated me for being awarded Team Member of the Year for the Southeast Fisheries Science Center,” Harris said to a crowd of current and former NOAA employees and their allies at the Rally to Save NOAA on June 4.
Probationary workers, those with less than two years of service who are on a trial period before gaining certain employment rights, were affected by the layoffs. Departments like the agency’s satellite division, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the Office of Space Commerce and more took a hit after the mass firing.
The rally was presented by Fork Off Coalition, a group of recently laid-off federal employees from various agencies, and advocated for protecting NOAA from further cuts while denouncing the mass layoffs the organization has experienced.
Intentionally held outside the U.S. Department of Commerce headquarters in Northwest, D.C. during the annual NOAA Fish Fry— an event hosted in collaboration with Congressional officials to celebrate sustainable fisheries over small plates of seafood— speakers included members of Congress, former NOAA employees and other scientists.
“Right now, Trump administration officials are socializing with seafood while they decimate the very agency that they’re allegedly celebrating,” exclaimed the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists Dr. Gretchen Goldman, during the rally. “NOAA is here for the people. In every way that extreme weather and climate change affect us, NOAA protects us.”
The Trump Administration vs. NOAA
Although President Trump disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign in the 2024 election, many of his actions since his inauguration have aligned with the political initiative, including: dismantling the Department of Education, ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and making cuts to the NOAA in an attempt to conserve the Department of Commerce’s budget.
Chapter 21 of the 900-page manifesto justifies the downsizing and breaking down of NOAA by stating it garners $6.5 billion of the Department of Commerce’s $12 billion annual budget, and is one of the primary contributors to the “climate change alarm industry,” classifying the agency’s environmental stewardship as detrimental to the nation’s future prosperity.
“This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable,” reads page 675 of the presidential transition project. “That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions.”
After another series of firings since February, the agency has lost approximately 1,000 employees, including 600 from the National Weather Service (NWS). As NOAA has predicted a 60% chance for above-normal activity in the 2025 hurricane season, scientists are concerned about the potential risk that staff and budget cuts may pose to the public, who will need accurate weather advisories.
“Right now, because of the cuts in funding and staffing that have already happened… offices that previously operated 24/7 to keep the public informed and safe, now don’t even have the funding to perform their daily monitoring operations,” Goldman said. “These are cuts that have already happened, and any additional cuts now are even more dangerous. Saving NOAA means saving lives.”
A Battle for Climate, Conservation: ‘There’s a Reason Why Working at NOAA Is a Dream Job’
While Project 2025 and the Trump administration’s actions doubt the value of NOAA, for Harris, his work at the SEFSC was “awe-inspiring research.”
As part of the Climate, Ecosystems and Fisheries Initiative, he and other scientists were building downscale regional ocean models and applying them to ecosystem and fishery models to provide information on how climate change could affect fisheries and protected species.
He entered the marine science field after he had already spent a considerable amount of time in the water being a commercial fisherman and scuba instructor. His affinity for water fueled his desire to use science to make an impact and bridge the spiritual beauty he saw in the element and its significance in human life as a grand resource.
“There’s a reason that working at NOAA is a dream job,” Harris told The Informer. “It was relatively stable, but you had this opportunity to do impactful, meaningful work where you felt like you were serving your community.”
Former Program Analyst at the NOAA Research International Activities Office, Madyson Miller, also attended the Save NOAA rally, as she was also laid off in February. She started working at the agency to do meaningful work that served the planet and the public– an aspiration she realized after graduating with a master’s degree in invasive seagrass ecology from the University of the Virgin Islands.
She enjoyed the work she did during her graduate school matriculation, but wasn’t satisfied with its influence.
“I just wasn’t making an impact,” she told The Informer. “I felt like I wanted my work to benefit people. I wanted to serve. I wanted a purpose.”
During her time at NOAA, Miller served two different roles. She and other employees would help foster relationships between scientists worldwide to assist them in meeting their goals, deeming the cultivation of those relationships a crucial step toward providing better weather modeling and climate forecasting.
Miller was also part of the United Nations Ocean Decade and was tasked with helping coordinate NOAA to align with the effort. This 10-year initiative aims to gather data needed to create more effective and science-driven policies to ensure a healthy ocean by 2030 through: focusing on eradicating marine pollution, increasing resilience to ocean and coastal risks, discovering ocean-based solutions to climate change and more.
Through ocean acidification work— curating oral histories to give the ocean’s stories a voice and more— Miller and her colleagues’ work was significant in propelling the initiative toward success.
“I thought it was really neat to be able to work with people who were different from [me] and collaborate in that way, and it challenged me,” Miller told The Informer. “My beliefs, and the way I worked– to work with other people… kind of made [me] better and made the science better.”
Looking to the Future
Although Miller and Harris foresaw the NOAA layoffs that brought an abrupt stop to the work they’d dreamt of doing at an organization they cherished so deeply, they both have hope for the agency’s future because they believe in its value to the planet and humanity overall, and plan to continue advocating for its preservation.
“It’s sad and I miss it every day because I love the work I was doing,” Miller told The Informer. “But now that I’m unemployed, I do feel this sense of freedom now that I can advocate, and speak my mind and do what in my heart I think is right.”
While selling frozen chocolate bananas isn’t what Harris wants to do with his life, he’s finding things to bring him peace, like continuing the research he started at NOAA. He shared that the people in his life are confused as to why he continues doing the work without pay, but he boils it down to pure love for his passion, describing it as something he “can’t let go” of.
“Yeah, I had a dream. It was a full-time position to work with the best scientists that I’d ever met, and I spent my whole career working toward that,” said Harris. “I’m proud of it even though it was stripped away, so I’m here because I care. I’m here because I believe NOAA is worth fighting for… and worth saving.”
This post appeared first on The Washington Informer.
