NOAA firings in Seattle include orca-saving employee of the year

Until Thursday afternoon, Hanna Miller focused on protecting whales from oil spills, ship strikes, and fishing gear.

Miller was a natural resource specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the science-heavy federal agency that forecasts weather, tsunamis, and hurricanes, regulates fisheries, studies the climate, and protects salmon, orcas, and other endangered species that swim.

In 2022, she helped a multiagency team make sure endangered orcas didn’t swim into the diesel fuel belching out of the sunken Aleutian Isle fishing boat off Washington’s San Juan Island.

“I was on call for 42 days, tracking them every second that I was awake to make sure that they didn't go through [the oil spill],” Miller said.

In 2023, Miller was awarded employee of the year for NOAA Fisheries in the western United States, and in March 2024, she was promoted.

On Thursday afternoon, while on vacation in Hawaii, the federal biologist opened her work email on her personal phone to find she no longer had a job.

“The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs,” the email from Vice Admiral Nancy Hann, Deputy Under Secretary for Operations, reads.

“[I] just read it and had enough time to read it and share it with my personal email before I got locked out of my work account,” Miller said.

“I was just really devastated,” she added.

Hundreds of scientists and policy specialists received similar emails on Thursday as the Trump administration began downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Widespread layoffs at federal agencies in recent weeks have targeted new employees still on probation. Probationary employees, including those who were promoted within the past year, have limited rights to appeal their dismissals.

Miller was a week and half away from completing her year-long post-promotion probation when she was fired.

Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office claimed that more than 800 NOAA employees were terminated, while Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland put the number at about 650 on Friday.

“I know quite a handful personally of people who have been terminated through this probationary process alone,” Miller said.

Exact numbers, locations, and functions of terminated employees remained unclear on Friday.

“We do know that there were over 100 [National] Weather Service employees terminated,” Rick Spinrad, NOAA Administrator during the Biden administration, told reporters Friday.

“We're fighting like hell to reverse these illegal actions, and we're working very closely with lawyers to do that,” Van Hollen said.

RELATED: Stop international work, Trump administration tells ocean agency

NOAA, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has about 12,000 employees, more than half of whom are scientists and engineers, according to the agency’s website.

“Per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters,” NOAA spokesperson James Miller emailed in response to a KUOW interview and information request.

On Wednesday, the White House sent a memo to federal agency heads ordering them to prepare plans for major layoffs (“large-scale reductions in force”) by March 13.

“Tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens,” the memo from Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell states.

It calls the federal government “bloated” and “corrupt.”

The memo orders agency directors to lay off large numbers of staff, save money, and get rid of real estate, all while increasing productivity and providing “better service for the American people.”

NOAA owns or leases 620 facilities around the United States, including the campus where Hanna Miller worked near Seattle’s Warren G. Magnuson Park.

Vought was an architect of Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation blueprint for the Trump Administration to "take down the Deep State." It calls for breaking up and downsizing NOAA, including commercializing forecasts by the agency’s National Weather Service.

RELATED: Federal employees in Seattle rally against mass Trump administration layoffs

“Anything that I wrote or worked on was always going to be public and available for the public,” Miller said. “And I think that is one of the most impressive and kind of beautiful things about NOAA is making sure that everything is available to everyone.”

“Public servants are people who are very dedicated to protecting, well, in my case, protecting species and the ocean,” Miller said. “We could have taken higher paying jobs in other fields, but we've chosen these ones because we care.”