By Brad Brooks
BOULDER, Colorado (Reuters) -Over 1,000 protesters gathered outside a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, decrying Trump administration layoffs of what two current employees said were upward of 10% of scientists there.
The protest was organized by former U.S. Congressman David Skaggs, a Colorado Democrat for whom the NOAA building in Boulder is named. He said amid the boisterous demonstration that he had expected perhaps 100 people to show up, but police at the rally put the figure at over 1,000.
Skaggs said the far larger turnout represented the angst Americans are feeling as President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly remakes the federal government, cutting staff and costs across the bureaucracy.
“I was in church yesterday and I wept for my country, it is overwhelmingly sad and distressing,” Skaggs said. “We need to take a deep breath and gather our courage and stand up for what we know is right.”
The Trump administration last week fired over 800 NOAA workers, according to Congressional sources. At the rally in Boulder, two current NOAA employees who have not been fired estimated that 10% of the roughly 800 NOAA employees in Boulder were dismissed last week. The two employees asked not to be named, citing fears that they would lose their jobs.
The two and other scientists say cuts to NOAA put into jeopardy the quality and timeliness of everything from space weather forecasts used to predict disruptions to satellite operations and power grids, among other things, to life-saving wildfire, tornado and hurricane warnings.
Susan McLean, a retired manager at NOAA in Boulder, was at the protest and said the summary dismissal of NOAA workers would make it more difficult to attract talented scientists to federal jobs.
“We used to attract people even with our lower pay because we had a good mission and it was a mission valued by the public,” McLean said.
McLean said that she was at NOAA during the last serious effort at downsizing the federal workforce, under former President Bill Clinton. At that time, the cutbacks were done in tandem with managers at the various federal agencies and carried out over a number of years to avoid disruptions to vital services.
“Those cuts were done with a scalpel,” McLean said. “This is being done with a wrecking ball. It’s indiscriminate and it’s without thought.”
The governor’s seat and both houses of the state legislature in Colorado are controlled by Democrats, and 76.5% of Boulder County voters picked former Vice President Kamala Harris versus 20.8% Trump in last year’s election.
“This protest is a manifestation of how frustrated people are,” said Brenna Raeder, a demonstrator holding a “National Weather Service Saves Lives” sign. “It’s completely insane that we would defund these vital services, including the wildfire forecasts that save lives right here in Colorado.”
Demonstrators said the defense of science against the Trump administration’s aggressive cuts in the federal workforce should be a bipartisan cause.
NOAA did not reply to an emailed request for comment on the layoffs nor how many people at its Boulder offices had been fired.
Project 2025, a series of detailed conservative policy proposals whose ideas and thinkers have surfaced repeatedly as the Trump administration takes shape, says NOAA “has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” Project 2025 called for NOAA to be broken up and downsized.
In Silver Spring, Maryland, at another NOAA location, another 1,000 protesters were asking for the reinstatement of fired NOAA scientists.
“NOAA is critical to safe seafood that we eat, to weather forecasts involving dangerous hurricanes. A million different ways NOAA is a critical part of our lives and we need to keep this agency strong,” demonstrator Mike Tidwell said.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado; editing by Donna Bryson and Sandra Maler)
Comments