Trump fires NOAA scientists helping whales and offshore wind coexist

The Trump administration axed hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the key agencies tasked with making sure offshore wind activities can coexist with wildlife, including whales.

The firings on Thursday affected more than 800 federal employees, The New York Times reported. Many of NOAA’s roughly 13,000 staff members famously provide the nation’s weather forecasting services. But dozens are climate and wildlife scientists who work to ensure offshore wind development complies with U.S. wildlife protection laws.

America already has one large-scale offshore wind farm in operation. Two more are expected to come online this year: the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind 1 project in Massachusetts and the 715 MW Revolution Wind project in Rhode Island.

Whale researchers purged

A biologist working on the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, which migrates annually from Canada to the Southeast through key wind farm areas, described getting a termination email Thursday at 3:45 p.m. ET. When she spoke with Canary Media five hours later, her access to NOAA’s email server had already been cut off.

“I was working on a project specific to the Carolinas … to determine ​‘pinch points’ for these whales … areas that would not be suitable for future offshore wind,” said the biologist, who declined to be identified, citing uncertainty around ongoing lawsuits contesting the Trump administration’s mass firings.

The whale biologist was part of a three-person team newly created by NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center to monitor and protect North Atlantic right whales at their calving ground off the Southeastern coast.

Today, less than 375 of the whales remain. At such low numbers, every death matters. NOAA closely monitors the species and works to make sure offshore wind construction boats and other vessels stay clear.

Right whales have also been central to influential misinformation campaigns aimed at stopping offshore wind developments. Advocacy groups, some with backing from right-leaning think tanks like the Caesar Rodney Institute, have brought lawsuits to halt permitting on the false premise that offshore wind turbines are harmful to right whales.

NOAA scientists have found no evidence that a spike in whales washing up dead on East Coast beaches in recent years is linked to offshore wind activities. Many dead whales display injuries consistent with a ship strike.

And now the team of federal scientists that tracks the health and movements of this endangered animal has been decimated.

Although classified as probationary, the biologist monitoring North Atlantic right whales had worked for NOAA as a contractor for almost three years. She had been hired as a full-time federal employee in December.

Thursday’s purge ousted the biologist and one other member of the newly created team protecting critically endangered whales off the Southeast coast. Both hold doctoral degrees. Now, only one team member remains: a fieldwork researcher on a short-term contract.

That employee will be left with the vital task of trying to coordinate monitoring efforts with a long-standing right whale research group in New England that was also ​“hit hard” by Thursday’s layoffs, another NOAA staff member told Canary Media. Teri Frady, a spokesperson for NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, declined to answer questions about staff reductions, citing a ​“long-standing policy” to not discuss internal personnel matters with the press.

“We all had hoped Congress and lawsuits would do something to stop the madness before it got to NOAA. But nope,” said the NOAA staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The Northeast office oversees the right whale’s foraging grounds, which overlap with almost a half dozen wind farms in various stages of at-sea development from Maine to the New York Bight. That office’s work has also been key to fighting the growing misinformation about the offshore wind industry.

NOAA’s purge targeted probationary employees who have been in full-time roles for a short time. Another NOAA staff member told Canary Media that the probationary period is generally between one and two years, after which staff are afforded more job security. President Donald Trump appears to be leveraging the fact that probationary employees are easier to fire even if their work is valuable.

Losing experts on bats and maps

The NOAA layoffs follow similar cuts to probationary staff last month at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a branch of the Interior Department that leads permitting for offshore wind.

The roughly 2,300 Interior employees terminated on Feb. 14 included eight specialists involved in planning and permitting offshore renewable energy, according to an email provided to Canary Media by a current BOEM employee who requested anonymity. One was Eva Windhoffer, according to a LinkedIn post, who worked to improve data collection on bats and birds impacted by wind power development.

“It’s a good time to check in on your teammates,” wrote the head of BOEM’s renewable energy office in an email announcing the cuts to the staff, which was shared with Canary Media.

Under the Biden administration, BOEM’s renewables staff streamlined offshore wind permitting. Through efficiency efforts, the staff successfully guided nine commercial-scale offshore wind farms through the complex permitting pipeline and to final approval.

Though the offshore wind team was small, with about 80 members prior to this month’s firings, almost every employee in that BOEM office helped — either directly or indirectly — coordinate with other agencies to make sure proposed wind projects did not violate the Endangered Species Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the BOEM employee said.

At NOAA, it’s harder to determine exactly how many employees do the work that underpins responsible wind development in America. Its scientific products are critical to building any offshore wind farm, said one NOAA employee, whether it’s weather models, fishing datasets, or buoys listening for whale calls.

“Sometimes the work is half and half … part climate work, part offshore wind stuff,” said a biologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, who described how habitat-mapping specialists in his group researched the ways that climate change is altering where whales and other marine species spend their time.

Those models weren’t being developed for specific wind projects, he said, but the information was helping agencies determine which areas should get protected and which should get turbines as California plans for future offshore wind development.

Two mapping specialists who were doing that work were also laid off yesterday. The biologist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center called the loss ​“really, really rough.” Another fired NOAA employee told Canary Media, requesting anonymity, that 14 researchers were cut from NOAA’s 40-person ecosystem sciences division in California.

Meanwhile, the staff that runs the nation’s network of ocean sanctuaries lost 14 employees, a NOAA staff member said. Often compared to national parks, NOAA’s national marine sanctuaries protect thousands of square miles of ocean.

No sanctuary staff work on offshore wind exclusively, but a handful lead ongoing monitoring of whales, seabirds, and warming temperatures in and around ocean sanctuaries, like the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of southern California. The government has drawn from these datasets and other NOAA datasets to help with offshore wind planning and leasing work.

“These are American jobs that warn us about severe weather, protect our most vulnerable marine life, like whales and turtles, ensure abundant fisheries, and maintain a healthy ocean for those whose livelihoods depend on it,” said Beth Lowell, U.S. vice president of Oceana, an environmental nonprofit organization, in a statement released Thursday. ​“We’re calling on Congress to save NOAA from these disastrous cuts.”

But it seems more firings are already in the works.

The NOAA biologist working for the Southwest center said that the Office of Personnel Management has shut down his travel and expenditure requests. He told Canary Media that his office had received email notifications about a ​“reduction in force” slated for March 14. A Wednesday memo issuing guidance on reductions in force was sent to all executive agency leaders by OPM’s acting director and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint that calls for the breakup and commercialization of NOAA.

“Project 2025 is being carried out to a ​‘T’ right now,” the Southwest NOAA biologist said.