These scientists saw a future in public service—until Trump’s ‘massacre’ hit

From ScienceMag:

One year ago this week, in what came to be called the Valentine’s Day massacre, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration began to fire tens of thousands of federal employees who had fewer job protections because they were “probationary,” a category that included some who had been in their “new” jobs as long as 3 years. Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) drove the terminations, which affected hundreds of government scientists working on everything from climate modeling to cancer research. A bombshell for the U.S. science community, they marked the beginning of a year of wider chaos, from grant cuts to more firings.

Most of the probationary worker cuts were eventually reversed by courts or agencies themselves. But many of the affected scientists chose to leave the government anyway, part of a massive exodus of more than 10,000 Ph.D.s last year.

Science reached out to a group of the “probies” to see how they’re doing now. For many, it was a tough year. One research program manager who asked not to be identified said she applied to nearly 80 jobs, worked part time in retail, used up her savings, and often felt suicidal before getting a contractor job at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the agency that had fired her last February and did not reinstate her. “What DOGE did was reckless and irresponsible,” she says. “They have ruined so many lives.”

Here are some scientists’ stories.

The entomologist

For Anna Wallingford, getting fired from a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) research lab led to what she calls “the ‘Etch A Sketch–shake’ moment,” when her career became a blank slate. Just 10 months earlier, the entomologist had scored a job studying pest management at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center—and with it, she thought, the promise of long-sought stability after 3 years in a soft-money faculty position at the University of New Hampshire.

A month after her firing, she and her colleagues who had been on probationary status were rehired. But she’d had to kill off her insect strains when she was fired, and the prospect of new uncertainty in the workplace felt unbearable—there were rumors USDA was planning to shutter the entire center. Heartbroken, she took the agency’s deferred resignation deal, which provided pay and benefits through 30 September 2025.

After a lot of lap swimming and deep contemplation, she resolved to move back to New Hampshire, where she grew up, and come up with a new plan. Outrage at the Trump administration’s firing spree among Wallingford’s friends and family meant she got a lot of emotional support, and former colleagues helped her network. “Everybody gets fired or laid off at some point in their life. Not everybody gets national outrage about it on your behalf.”

Wallingford has started a nonprofit consulting group called New Hampshire Community Supported Research. It will continue the kind of work she had done at the university, combining pest research and outreach to farmers. Business feels a bit rocky because of diminishing county and state funding. But she hopes to stay afloat with grants, contracts with companies for testing biocontrol products, and crowdsourced support. “I gave up a normal life to pursue a career in science,” she says. “I’m going to figure out a way to do it.”

The grant review officer

Doug Dluzen recalls getting a reassuring call from his supervisor at NIH as rumors about mass firings flew around his office on a Friday last February. His job as a scientific review officer (SRO) was considered “mission critical” and was safe, his bosses said. The following week, he was told to turn in his badge and computer.

Dluzen, whose Ph.D. is in genetics, was 3 months into training as an SRO to run peer-review panels for the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. He had previously had “an eclectic career” that included studying health disparities at a university with NIH funding, working in communications at NIH, and providing career coaching to graduate students and postdocs. When he wound up on the DOGE list as part of a cost-cutting plan to consolidate NIH peer review at a single center, he says, “My final career pivot ended up being a very temporary stop.”

After spending time on administrative leave and briefly being reinstated by a court order, Dluzen got a final termination notice in May. He quickly realized a job hunt would not be easy in a “market flooded with all of these wonderful scientists” newly out of federal agencies. He set up a one-person consulting business doing communications for clients such as scientific societies. But he needed a job with health insurance—his wife’s federal science job is also vulnerable, and they have a child with a rare disease.

This month, Dluzen starts a position with a contractor that provides logistical support to an NIH institute. He’s glad to be reconnected to NIH, an organization he still finds “amazing,” he says. “It’s been a roller coaster ride.”

The marine scientist

Alexandra Avila’s job termination notice from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) came after the initial wave of federal agency firings. On 27 February, an email arrived shortly after lunch “saying my skills were no longer required,” she recalls. “Basically, I had 2 hours to leave.” NOAA, which had funded Avila’s Ph.D. through its Dr. Nancy Foster Scholarship Program, had hired her into a marine scientist position 6 months earlier at Washington state’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

It took her some time to grieve the loss of her opportunity to do work studying and protecting ocean ecosystems. “I love doing that, and that was taken away from me,” she says. She found it helpful to connect with other NOAA “probies” online. “We’d all been through that shared trauma.”

The job loss created financial challenges for her and her husband, who had a daughter in day care. Avila quickly got a part-time role at a local nonprofit conservation organization, but the family struggled to cover its bills. They made use of the local food bank, secured federal food benefits and Medicaid, and received state support to subsidize their daughter’s day care.

Avila spent much of past year applying “nonstop” for jobs in science, policy, teaching, and fisheries management. “I would get like third place, or fifth place, out of hundreds of applicants,” she says. Finally, in January, she started a 1-year fellowship through the West Coast Ocean Alliance, working with the Quileute Tribe in the same area as in her NOAA job on fisheries science and management. The pay is far less than she was making as a federal employee. But she’s happy to be back doing full-time work she loves. “I might be able to work with some of my old NOAA co-workers.”

Avila worries for the future of federal science agencies. “The brain drain that’s happening right now is going to cause a lot of damage. At NOAA itself we lost all the young, new generation of scientists coming in.” Meanwhile, retirements claimed “the oldest ones, the ones that are supposed to pass down the knowledge,” she says. “It’s just heartbreaking.”

The chemist

Analytical chemist Ron Hunter was nearly 1 year into heading a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tobacco analysis lab when he learned that he and three other lab members had been terminated.

Hunter had taken the position at the Atlanta field lab analyzing tobacco products for nicotine and toxic chemicals in April 2024 after spending much of his career in industry. Joining the federal workforce—with a lab just three blocks from his home—felt like “a good move,” he says. He hired new staff, beefed up the lab’s analytical work, and earned the trust of longtime staffers. “We were in this rhythm, we were preparing to move to a new lab, and we had all these fun projects,” he says.

Because his 1-year probationary period ended while a court challenge to the firings was ongoing, Hunter had his job back by May. But he left FDA anyway, figuring he was probably going to be cut eventually. After months of networking, consulting as a career coach to help pay his bills, and losing “a lot of weight” from stress, he found a position with the CDC Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He’s now serving as an adviser to an initiative that helps low- and middle-income countries with high rates of lead poisoning build lab capacity to test blood samples for the neurotoxin and reduce exposures.

Hunter says he’s glad to still be working in public health—but outside the federal government. “I’m really thankful to be in a public health environment at a time when public health is under attack,” Hunter says.

The computational biologist

Heather Deel was offered a dream position working as a computational biologist at USDA on the same day Trump was elected to a second term in 2024. “It was a big, careermaking position,” says Deel, who had been working as a postdoc since finishing her Ph.D. 2 years earlier. “It felt like a turning point.”

On the day of her firing, 13 February 2025, Deel and her husband had gone to an ultrasound appointment and heard their baby’s heartbeat for the first time. “I had had two prior miscarriages where we had gone to these scans and not seen a heartbeat,” she says, so “there was a lot of bittersweet emotions in the air.” Then around 9 p.m., she received an email saying she was losing her job, effective immediately, along with more than a dozen other employees who had been working in her Colorado office on probationary status.

The anticipation of her son’s arrival guided Deel’s decisions in the tumultuous months that followed. In March, she was reinstated after a court case overturned the probationary firings. But when USDA announced the second round of its deferred resignation program in April, Deel took the offer. “I wanted to stay in that unit for the rest of my career,” she says. But she worried she would get fired anyhow, especially given that her job involved measuring greenhouse gas emissions related to farming practices. “I felt very, very targeted,” she says. Resignation “seemed like the safer option and it guaranteed me insurance through the birth of my son.”

She leveraged personal connections from her graduate school days to land a job at Pisces Molecular, a small company in Boulder, Colorado, that applies molecular biology to solving challenges in fisheries, wildlife, and conservation biology. She’s still using her computation biology skills and enjoys her job. She also counts herself lucky to have managed to stay in science without uprooting her young family. “Most people I know who have found positions have had to move across the country for them, or even internationally.” But Deel looks back at the USDA position and laments the missed chance to work on a national project that could have had a big impact.

Deel is still open to returning to the federal government someday—after what she sees as a temporary state of turmoil. “When the next administration comes through, there’s going to be many years of repair. And I want to be part of that repair.”

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