This story was originally published by Biographic and is republished here by permission.
A stocky brown-and-white shorebird scurried along the beach, pausing midstride to probe the mud for tiny pink clams that are a lifeline for rock sandpipers and many other species that call Alaska home. Nearby, my friend and former colleague Dan Ruthrauff collected observations to enter into eBird, a public reporting platform, recording data as diligently as he had during the months we’d worked together in the field. The bird’s delicately painted breast and long, slender beak belied its remarkable hardiness; during his Ph.D. research, Ruthrauff had shown me photographs of overwintering rock sandpipers waiting out a cold snap, their feathers ruffled and their legs encased in ice like tiny popsicle sticks. Now, while he tracked the sandpiper’s movements, I took pictures of several seabird carcasses that had washed up on the beach, documenting another of the growing number of wildlife mortality events that I’d been studying for the past decade.
We’d arrived by sailboat to this rain-drenched cove in the Shumagin Islands of southwestern Alaska, where fields of eelgrass nudged crumbling sea stacks and black-legged kittiwakes perched on steep rock walls. We weren’t there in our official capacity as biologists, but we’re always on the job when it comes to paying attention to the ecosystems and species we’ve long studied and cared for. Until recently, Ruthrauff and I were research biologists for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Alaska, with more than 50 years of experience between us. Ruthrauff was a shorebird and waterfowl specialist; I focused largely on wildlife and environmental health.
We left our respective positions in April 2025 as the Trump administration’s assault on federal science reached its initial climax. This was not an easy departure, but it felt untenable to stay in the climate of hostility and uncertainty that was building at USGS and other federal agencies. My decision was cemented when I heard Doug Burgum, a billionaire businessman who had recently been appointed Secretary of the Interior, describe the country’s public lands as a “balance sheet,” with the explicit desire to profit from their development and exploitation. The Department of Interior oversees USGS, and thus Burgum had become our highest-level boss. In his “welcome” speech, he revealed both the depths of his team’s scientific ignorance and its intent to dismantle key components of our research, with severe implications for not only our careers but the nation’s wildlife, lands and waters.
On top of what many of my colleagues and I saw as the administration’s pro-extraction, anti-science agenda, we faced another onslaught. Over the preceding weeks, we’d received threatening emails instructing us to “turn in” our colleagues for any suspected promotion of diversity and equity initiatives, including benign programs intended to support women or underrepresented groups in science. We were informed, on a near-daily basis, that we were likely to lose our jobs and all programmatic funding, and were advised to prepare a statement to send to partners in other agencies in case we faced sudden termination. Such messages were often routed through fabricated email addresses and used demeaning, unprofessional language.
The effect was both disheartening and chilling. The federal employees I worked alongside were not rabble-rousers but committed public servants, focused on providing unbiased scientific information to help manage species and ecosystems and protect human safety. Among our collective roles, we forecasted earthquakes and other natural hazards, measured toxin levels in subsistence foods, gauged streamflow that boaters and aquatic life depend on, mitigated human-wildlife conflicts, and provided early warning for infectious diseases like avian influenza. Far from being elite academics, my colleagues worked directly for the benefit of others. In Southeast Alaska, for example, USGS scientists used decades of mapping data to identify deadly landslide hazards as the warming climate brings more intense rainfall. On the Yukon River, my colleagues investigated the crash of chinook salmon stocks that left Alaska Native communities without a critical food source and brought the commercial fishing industry to a standstill.
By spring of 2025, however, our workplace felt less like a top-tier public science institution and more like an environment intended to cultivate submission via intimidation. We were fearful of losing our jobs, or worse. As a writer and concerned citizen, I knew my ability to speak out would be compromised. And as a researcher, I couldn’t, in good conscience, abandon the scientific transparency and conservation ethics that had formed the backbone of my training.
Federal employees like me were thus left with two impossible options: stay and tolerate whatever abuse and forced complicity came next, or leave and forfeit an entire career. Some of my colleagues simply could not leave: They had hospitalized children who couldn’t risk a break in health care, single-income mortgages to pay, or elderly family members to support. Others believed that the system of law would ultimately prevail. Most did not have a second career option at the ready, yet many nonetheless lost their jobs — sometimes with a few hours’ notice, and other times with no notice at all.
Ruthrauff and I were fortunate: He was eligible for early retirement, and I had a second job as a freelance writer to fall back on, with a new book contract in the works. Still, it was a decision neither of us wanted to make. We were given less than a week to collect our belongings, sign off from projects that were years in the making, and archive as much data as we could before permanently losing access to our email.
We are among the estimated 352,000 employees who have so far been fired or left the federal workforce in response to the Trump administration’s policies. Science has been hit especially hard, with climate, environment, health and wildlife budgets specifically targeted. Some 7,800 research grants have been frozen or terminated, and further proposed cuts could result in additional losses to programs and personnel. And although Congress is pushing back, much of the damage has already been done. With programs and staff gone and employee morale tanked, it’s simply not possible to pick up where we left off.
For all of its promised cost savings, the Trump administration’s chaotic cuts over the past year haven’t actually saved taxpayers money. The federal budget grew by $220 billion in the first hundred days of the administration compared to the same period the prior year — yet our nation has lost more than many people realize. We have long relied on weather and natural hazard forecasting for our safety; we have trusted that our national parks will be sustained in perpetuity; we have hunted, fished and recreated with the assurance that someone is looking after our natural resources. That someone might have been me, or Dan Ruthrauff or any of my other colleagues who took an oath of public service only to find that they were no longer able to deliver on their promises — not because they weren’t qualified or didn’t care, but because the current government has failed us all.
For all of its promised cost savings, the Trump administration’s chaotic cuts over the past year haven’t actually saved taxpayers money.
AFTER RESIGNING, I took the opportunity to sail with my husband and 9- and 11-year-old sons on our small expedition sailboat through the Northwest Passage, a goal we’d been working toward for years. The same passions that drew me to my work as a biologist have long dovetailed with my personal interests. I’d walked, paddled, skied and sailed across much of my home state; the four-month-long sailing trip was a chance to connect the dots across the broader Arctic and to report on what I’d witnessed. Along the way, I conducted in-person research for my forthcoming book about wildlife response to climate change.
Our route passed many places familiar to me from my work as a federal biologist. I glimpsed the snow-covered peaks of the Brooks Range backing up to the Arctic Coastal Plain, where I’d lived out of a tent while studying the effects of climate-driven storm surge on nesting common eiders. We stopped in communities where I’d partnered with local residents to document the risks to wildlife and people from harmful algal blooms, an emerging environmental health issue. The landscape had changed dramatically in the two decades since I began my career. Barrier islands where I’d done fieldwork were now routinely battered by what had once been described as hundred-year storms; hungry polar bears had become regular summer visitors; and sea ice had given way to large areas of open water. We saw historical sites that had flooded and seawalls that had been breached. It was impossible not to worry about how the isolated communities in this part of the world will feel the loss of federal support when salmon fail to return or wildfires rip through boreal forests or permafrost slumps into the sea.
Ruthrauff joined us for the 800-mile sailing leg from Nome to Sand Point, both in Alaska, offering an extra set of hands and an endless source of bird facts for my curious 9-year-old. It was our first reunion since we’d exchanged hasty goodbyes while packing up our USGS offices five months earlier.
Initially, as we scanned the horizon with binoculars and washed dishes with seawater, it felt as though we’d just stepped into another field stint. Only later, as we sailed past stretches of coastline where we’d each worked did we discuss our departure. I learned that a multiyear project to investigate the impacts of climate change on Arctic-nesting geese that Ruthrauff helped organize had been halted. The research I’d been doing on harmful algal blooms no longer had a program lead or a budget. Long-term monitoring studies — on caribou, polar bears, walruses, fishes and birds — that provide basic population inventories necessary for endangered species assessments, sustainable hunting limits, and other applications had been shelved indefinitely. Meanwhile, employees were prohibited from speaking to the media, including about topics such as avian influenza and other issues that pertain to animal and human health. Our remaining colleagues and their expertise had been effectively silenced.
Other federal programs, such as those that focused on weather forecasting, were losing funds so quickly they couldn’t perform essential public services. Those gaps would soon become evident.
We had ventured into the Bering Sea at a time when the weather gods were smiling, but before long the mood would change, with disastrous effects. Far to our west, the anomalously warm waters of the North Pacific were stirring up trouble. Three weeks later, after we’d continued south and out of harm’s way, a Category 4 storm called Typhoon Halong hit the coastal villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, changing course so quickly residents weren’t able to evacuate. Survivors, many of whom are now temporarily living in my hometown of Anchorage nearly 800 kilometers (500 miles) away, have become not only climate refugees, but victims of federal funding cuts: A $20 million coastal resilience grant was canceled in the months prior to the storm, at the same time that federal weather balloons were grounded and forecasting budgets were slashed.
Though no amount of preparation could have changed the storm’s track or severity, the lack of resources and information made a bad situation worse. Rick Thoman, a longtime Alaska meteorologist, wrote that while it’s not entirely clear whether the lack of weather balloons affected the forecast, “it seems likely that that had some effect on the model performance.” Emergency funding intended to help communities respond to extreme weather events, meanwhile, is no longer available under the Trump administration. That makes the future even more uncertain for the people of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, many of whom are attempting to maintain their cultural roots while living out of temporary accommodations in the state’s biggest city.
These are not scientists or disgruntled employees, but real people feeling the real effects of a federal workforce in crisis. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to recognize that these and other losses will reverberate for decades to come, and that the true price of dismantling our federal science programs is far higher than any supposed cost-cutting measures have saved.
ON THE LAST DAY before we dropped Ruthrauff in the Unangax̂ community of Sand Point, where I’d spent one frigid December chasing sea ducks as a USGS employee, we did a final eBird survey. It was a drizzly afternoon with fickle sailing conditions, gusty one minute, dead calm the next. Ruthrauff sat in the cockpit with binoculars trained on the jumpy horizon; I held onto an overhead rail and steered through the waves.
As we called out our sightings — sooty shearwater, common murre, black-legged kittiwake — we knew that these observations were nothing more than lone data points in a sea of information needs. But we also knew that even the most seemingly mundane reports, taken together, can provide valuable insight. Public data platforms such as eBird will never replace detailed monitoring studies, but in the absence of federal support, having extra eyes on the water, in the sky and in the trees might help fill some of the gaps. Turning our collective attention to the natural world also offers the sort of inspiration we need in a time of crisis. From hardy rock sandpipers waiting out a deep freeze to the millions of seabirds that survived Typhoon Halong, we need look no farther than our own backyards to find examples of resilience. We, too, must find a way to weather this storm.
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