In the middle of February, Hannah and Ryan were abruptly fired from their federal jobs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS). She has a PhD in soil science from the University of Wyoming and started working with the agency in September. Ryan has a degree in civil engineering and started his job last spring.
According to the USDA-ARS website, the agency works on “scientific solutions to national and global agricultural challenges” and supports over 600 research projects in over 90 locations. Research shows that public agricultural and research development generates an average of $20 in benefits to the U.S. economy for every $1 of spending, but some of those solutions could be on the back burner for now.
Hannah and Ryan estimate that about 10% of the people in their building were let go in February; the USDA did not respond by deadline on Friday morning.
On Mar. 5, an independent federal board called the Merit Systems Protection Board ordered the USDA to temporarily reinstate about 6,000 fired employees on the grounds of illegal termination. As of the morning of Mar. 7, Hannah and Ryan hadn’t heard if they would be getting their jobs back.
The two fired USDA-ARS employees talked with Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann about how cuts might impact their fields of work and what they think is next for farms in the Cowboy State. They both asked to only be identified by their first names, for fear of future retribution for themselves and their co-workers.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Hannah: I worked directly with a lot of farmers, visiting farms, going to meetings of farmers, and making sure that they had the most up-to-date research to inform their management decisions. Also listening to what challenges they were facing, and making sure that those challenges were being reflected in the research that the Agricultural Research Service was doing [and] bringing those concerns back to the researchers.
I mostly worked with grain farmers in southeastern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado, especially on projects helping them adapt to drought [and] making sure that they had the most up-to-date information on different practices and how those practices could influence soil health.
Ryan: My primary job duty was to investigate the environmental and economic impacts of government funded farm management practices. Each year, two billion tax dollars are allocated to a federal program called EQIP, which stands for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.
Those funds are given to farmers and ranchers to do things such as improve water and air quality, conserve water, increase soil health, reduce erosion and mitigate against extreme weather, while importantly having a neutral to positive effect on profit.
My work was related to measuring the effect of those various EQIP farm management practices in the Front Range and the plains of eastern Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska, so that we essentially know which practices are most effective in this region.
H: Right as we were leaving, the office was forced to cancel all travel. Our researchers work on farms across this whole region in Colorado and Wyoming, and they have research projects on different research stations.
Not being able to travel to those research projects because we don't have the support staff to coordinate that travel is really going to negatively impact that research and mean that we can't serve a large swath of farmers in the region.
R: As far as I know, the project that I was working on has completely stalled. There is no one to fill the 40 hours of work per week that I was allocated to work on this project. So for the foreseeable future, that research is just not going to be worked upon.
H: All my projects revolved around helping smaller farmers deal with the impacts of drought in this region and all of those projects have been cancelled.
Pretty much all of the smaller farms I work with in Wyoming rely on some form of government programs, often the Conservation Reserve Program or subsidized crop insurance.
There's so many threats from extreme weather, especially things like drought and hail, that smaller farms really struggle to absorb those risks and rely on these government programs to stay in business.
Part of Project 2025 does include goals to cancel the Conservation Reserve Program and to greatly reduce subsidized crop insurance. With those programs potentially going away, I just see a lot of smaller farms going out of business and going bankrupt, especially in this region.
Editor's Note: On Feb. 20, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that $20 million in contracts for the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program, and the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program were no longer frozen, following a review of the funding.
The larger private agricultural companies like Monsanto Bayer and some of these other big companies are really focused on these larger agricultural regions like Iowa and the Pacific Northwest, and are just not going to address the problems that these smaller farms face in Wyoming and eastern Colorado, where it's a harsh environment to be farming in the first place.
R: Losing out on about 10% of the workforce is inevitably going to stall or cancel certain areas of research or certain vital services for the public. Whenever you let go of people, it just directly means that less productivity is going to happen. Less services and less research are going to be accomplished.
H: I think there's some misconception that probationary employees were just newer employees. While newer employees were probationary, there were also people who recently switched roles or were recently promoted. When you get promoted or switch roles, you go back into a probationary period. On top of that, research scientists, a lot of whom have been working their way up at these agencies for decades, once they become a research scientist, they have a three year probationary period. So people were fired who had been at the USDA for 20 years who were recently promoted, as well as a lot of us younger, newer employees.
All of our termination letters cited our performance, ostensibly that we are fired due to poor performance. But in reality, none of our supervisors were even told about our firings and we all had positive performance reviews. We've since received letters confirming that we had exemplary performance, but because of that poor performance, that stated reason, none of us are eligible for any severance.
R: We were told about four days before the terminations began that local leadership was cautiously optimistic for the security of our jobs. There was absolutely no indication that this was coming. It feels like everyone was completely blindsided by this.
H: Ryan was trying to buy a house.
R: The day that I learned that I was getting fired, I was at a home inspection for the house that we were planning to close on in early March. So unfortunately, after some tears, we had to rescind our offer.
H: I got fired late Friday night. I had been at a conference speaking to farmers in Cheyenne, Wyoming on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I was rushing to try to email people that I had been working with to let them know that if I didn't respond, that that probably meant I had been locked out of all my accounts and fired.
R: I'm planning on getting involved in one of the major class action lawsuits. This will be the first time I've ever been involved in something like this, so it is a little bit scary.
The majority of the probationary employees just recently started, most of us are recent college grads or postdocs. We don't have a lot of money saved up. Just the thought of how we're going to pay for this class action lawsuit if ultimately it's unsuccessful, that's a question that's looming in my mind right now.
H: I would just echo that, I'm looking into joining one of the class action lawsuits. I've never been involved with lawyers before or in any sort of lawsuit. So [I’m] just trying to figure out how to navigate this, while also starting to apply for jobs and figure out what are the next steps.
R: I have absolutely no idea where my partner and I will wind up geographically. I don't have a good guess as to what sort of work I will be involved in after this. I think the most logical step as a civil engineer would be to move into the private consulting industry.
But even that feels like a little bit of a stretch right now, because as we spend time combing through private consulting websites or websites like Indeed, it's becoming pretty clear that there are fewer jobs available right now than there were a few months ago or like a year ago.
H: With all of these cuts in federal funding, I don't know if [my partner and I] will be able to stay in Wyoming.
I really enjoyed this work, I found it to be really important and meaningful. I want to keep working with farmers on the ground. I don't want to just go work for one of the big ag companies that doesn't always have farmers’ best interest at heart. But Wyoming just doesn't have the best state support for agriculture either, in terms of groups that are actually giving support to farmers.
With all this happening, I see us probably having to move out of Wyoming and find somewhere where we can pursue the kind of work that we feel is meaningful and that we want to do.
