Scientists at NOAA lab in Seattle cleaned bathrooms after maintenance contracts lapsed

Trump administration spending cuts are disrupting work at a federal facility in Seattle. A recent ProPublica story revealed that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Montlake Laboratory were helping clean bathrooms after their facilities’ maintenance contract wasn't renewed. Nick Tolimieri is a biologist and a union rep with the local fisheries chapter. He spoke to KUOW’s Kim Malcolm about what’s going on.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: The ProPublica piece said there are more than 350 people employed in your labs, and their jobs include things like monitoring fisheries and endangered species, and testing seafood after oil spills. How has that work changed for you and your colleagues recently?

Nick Tolimieri: It's not so much that the things we're supposed to be doing have changed, but it's become harder to do them, and harder to prepare to do them. For example, we have a freeze on the use of credit cards, which has made preparing for the annual surveys that we do to support fisheries management difficult. And we've had a lot of people leave because of the delayed resignation, and the voluntary early retirement. That’s putting a stress on staffing for these types of projects.

And are you still cleaning bathrooms?

We are not. We did have our contract reinstated shortly after the ProPublica article came out. So, they’re back on campus, doing the job that they do, which is important. And I just want to point out that, it's one thing to talk about us having to clean toilets, but, they were not getting paid potentially, so they lost a week of income. I think that's also a side of the story that's important, that these contract cuts also hit other people's livelihoods.

And how about the removal of hazardous waste, which is necessary for work to continue there in the lab safely?

The hazardous waste issue is not so much a lab safety issue as it's a lab functioning issue. We can handle the waste safely. The problem is we have to store it, and it builds up, and we are required to remove it from campus at a certain rate, and there are limits to how much you can store. As that storage fills up, certain labs have to just shut down and stop doing the work that they're doing.

What were you told about why the janitors and the folks who handle the hazardous waste weren't coming anymore, and whose idea was that?

These contracts, that are pretty basic in terms of operating functions, are being approved at the Department of Commerce level, instead of locally. And I think any incoming administration is going to want to look at policy and has the right to set research priorities, but these are not like research grants. We're talking about just standard functions that don't have any kind of political ramifications to them.

These cuts, of course, are happening under the auspices of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is tasked with, as they say in their own words, finding fraud, abuse, and waste in the federal government. But what you have said is that what is happening at Montlake is the opposite of efficiency. How so?

Well, it doesn't seem to be particularly efficient to have the Secretary of Commerce approving janitorial contracts. I mean, that's something that should be done down the line and sort of more quickly, and it just creates a lot of obstacles and things like the credit card blocking to get things done quickly and efficiently. So, all of that kind of micromanaging from a high level makes it difficult for us to operate on our daily jobs.

How have you been impacted by the job cuts? Hundreds of people at NOAA, the ones who were probationary, were cut. Where does that stand now at Mountlake?

They were brought back on administrative leave, so they were never actually working again, but they were being paid, and then they were re-fired. They did have a bunch of problems with their health insurance. They were having premiums deducted during that period, but not paid to the insurance companies. On April 8, they all lost their insurance coverage again.

So, those people are gone, and the projects that they were working on are now in many cases not happening. There was an article in The Seattle Times about Owen Liu, who had been hired to do some pretty sophisticated spatial statistical modeling of where Pacific Hake, or Pacific Whiting, are going. It was probably the major research priority for the Hake Council, and that's just not happening anymore. So those people, when we lose them, they had a function, we hired them to do something. I mean, at some point, obviously management will maybe reprioritize things and reassign people to different tasks, but with a dwindling workforce, I think we’re able to do less.

Have you spoken to any administration officials or NOAA management about this situation? Are they offering any explanations?

We have not. We do communicate with our local management regularly. They tell us what they know. In a lot of cases, they don't know things like, a lot of the firings went directly to the individual, without notifying local management. Same thing when we had our telework revoked. Our center director heard about that from me.

We mostly communicate locally. That's how our unions are built, really, to talk to our local management. We have had some problems where we had requested or opted to negotiate the change in telework, because it's a change in the workplace environment, and were told that they did not have to do it, because the U.S. Office of Personnel Management says they don't have to anymore.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.