‘This caught everybody off guard,’ fired Santa Cruz NOAA employee says

When Jerimiah Oetting heard that his name was on a list of probationary employees who could be laid off as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, he began downloading the files and documents he would need off his computer.

A science communications specialist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oetting, 36, had been working at NOAA Fisheries’ Santa Cruz laboratory at UC Santa Cruz’s Coastal Sciences campus since August 2024 after spending more than three years as a writer and reporter for radio station KAZU, the NPR affiliate covering the Monterey Bay area.

His boss warned him nearly a month ago that his name was on a list of new federal employees, but couldn’t tell Oetting if that meant a termination was coming. After he didn’t hear anything more for a few weeks, Oetting said he started getting cautiously optimistic that he might keep his job.

Around 12:40 p.m. last Thursday, the email arrived in Oetting’s inbox. It said Oetting’s “ability, knowledge and skills did not fit the agency’s current needs.” He was given an hour and 20 minutes to leave the office.

“It’s a flat-out lie,” he told Lookout on Tuesday of the contents of the email. “My performance reviews were glowing. I got an award from my supervisor. I’ve heard nothing but good things about my work, and six months ago there was a desperate need for my role and position. I can’t imagine that the agency has flipped on that.”

Oetting, to his knowledge, is the only NOAA employee in Santa Cruz who has been fired as a result of mass layoffs at the agency that went into effect late last week.

The layoffs appeared to cover only employees in probationary periods, or those with less than two years of employment. Oetting said the previous few weeks had involved “a crazy amount of anxiety,” but a small glimmer of hope that he’d be able to keep his job. 

That glimmer disappeared in an instant Thursday afternoon. “Nobody in my building knew that this was coming, this caught everybody off guard,” Oetting said. “I’ve never been fired or laid off before, but I know people who have, and usually you have a sense that it’s coming. This was three weeks of limbo and then suddenly the rudest way to be let go.”

Oetting said his colleagues were shocked and angry, and one even cried. He said that not only are the remaining workers upset at how their colleagues were treated, they are afraid for their own job security.

“Everybody there is so committed to the work. They’ve spent their entire careers, really, serving the public and making sure that Americans can fish, that there’s a commercial fishery, and that species don’t go extinct,” he said. “I can’t imagine having an entire career in civil service, and after 20 or 30 years, being told that it was all for nothing, that you’re lazy and your work is worthless.”

Oetting added that he’s upset to no longer be doing important work, which largely involved communicating with NOAA employees and the public about the laboratory’s work and projects. For example, he was working on a series of stories for the agency explaining how scientists and regulators use data to set the salmon fishing season, which would determine whether or not it opens this year. While he said that scientists are still working on the research, firing communications staff leaves a hole in the project and puts the stories in jeopardy.

“There’s less transparency in how these decisions are made and how the public can get involved in those decisions,” he said. “Without people like me, stories like that aren’t being told, and it puts people in the dark about the federal agency.”

Matthew Koller, another communications specialist, was one of six Monterey County NOAA employees to be let go as part of the mass firings, per Monterey County Now. He was working on the Climate Ecosystems and Fisheries Initiative (CEFI), which in layman’s terms means integrating climate forecasts into fishery assessments — like estimates of fish population numbers and mortality rate — to ensure long-term viability for marine resources. His work also involved translating data and research from scientists for fishery leadership and management, allowing those nonscientific leaders to both understand it and use it to design policies.

“Suddenly, you have real subject-matter experts working on something very dense and jargony, and then you have fisheries managers that don’t speak that language, and you’ve cut out someone who’s an essential link in that chain,” Koller told Lookout on Tuesday.

Koller said continued firings will only further stress NOAA programs, including CEFI, which could lose the staff it needs to run.

Now, Koller, 36, said he’s grieving the loss of a great opportunity and a job that he hoped he’d have for life, even though he had only worked there for four months. He and his fiancée are getting married later this year, and had just put a deposit down on a wedding venue. They are figuring out what to do next.

He said he is applying for unemployment and plans to explore routes to challenge his termination in the coming days — maybe an appeal to the federal Merit Systems Protection Board. The board is tasked with protecting federal workers from issues such as employment decisions based on partisanship or retaliation against whistleblowers.

“I have to reorient my personal narrative and realize that I’m going to be pounding the pavement next week looking for jobs,” Koller said. 

Oetting said he has heard of large law firms looking to pursue legal action against the federal government, action he might consider joining. He said that if the firings were rescinded and he is able to get his job back, he would likely return to the position — but the instability under the current administration has him worried.

“I loved my job quite a bit, it was a great job when I got hired,” he said. “I’m not so sure it’s a good job anymore.”

Oetting added that he’s concerned about the future of the agency. Eventually, he said, workers will retire and there will be few left to take over the work they are doing due to the firings — and doesn’t think many are jumping at the chance to apply to the agency: “I don’t know who in their right mind would apply for a federal job right now. It’s not the secure workforce that it once was.”

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