Mass layoffs in the federal workforce ordered by President Donald Trump began to hit Alaska employees last week, with workers losing jobs at multiple agencies across the state.
The scale of the Alaska layoffs wasn’t fully clear, but by Friday, Feb. 14, included around 30 Alaska employees at the U.S. Forest Service and 30 with the National Park Service, according to employees and union representatives.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said late Friday that “dozens of Alaskans — potentially over 100 in total” had lost their jobs, criticizing what she described as “abrupt terminations.”
The Alaska reductions came amid reports of federal workers across the country losing their jobs as the Trump administration aggressively moved to shrink the size of the federal workforce.
In Alaska, the firings could have major impacts on the services that Alaskans have come to expect from the federal government, including summer wildland firefighting, tourism services, infrastructure projects and fishery management and protection.
Trump’s plan to reduce the size and scope of the federal government could have a disproportionate impact in Alaska, which has roughly 15,000 federal employees.
After offering federal workers the opportunity to resign earlier this month, the administration ordered agency heads to eliminate most probationary employees, who are in their first year or two of employment and have limited recourse or job protection.
Roughly 1,200 Alaskans are in their first year of federal employment, according to figures provided to state lawmakers earlier this month by David Traver, chief steward for the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3028, representing workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
If all of them lost their jobs, it would be a loss of $88 million in wages in Alaska, Traver told state lawmakers.
Among the Alaskans who lost their jobs Friday was Jillian Jablonski, a fish biologist in the Chugach National Forest who had been in the job just three weeks shy of the end of her 12-month probationary period. She was fired through a form letter, she said.
Her work on invasive aquatic plants and ensuring salmon spawning passage would “likely be shelved” because there would be no one else to do it, she said in a Facebook post.
In a U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development office, three out of five employees who oversee federal assistance resources in rural Alaska were let go.
“A lot of our agencies in Alaska are just small staffs, so losing probationary or additional staff maybe has an outsized impact,” said Nils Andreassen, executive director of the Alaska Municipal League.
The rural development office was in the midst of processing federal funding to cover the cost of heavy equipment for rural communities.
It wasn’t immediately clear on Friday the eventual extent of layoffs in the federal workforce.
Murkowski criticized the firings in a statement on social media: “Many of these abrupt terminations will do more harm than good, stunting opportunities in Alaska and leaving holes in our communities.”
The senator said she shares “the administration’s goal of reducing the size of the federal government, but this approach is bringing confusion, anxiety, and now trauma to our civil servants — some of whom moved their families and packed up their whole lives to come here.
“Indiscriminate workforce cuts aren’t efficient and won’t fix the federal budget, but they will hurt good people who have answered the call to public service to do important work for our nation,” she said.
Murkowski said she is “trying to get answers” about the impact of the terminations, “but the response so far has been evasive and inadequate.”
The Department of Agriculture, which includes the Forest Service, appeared to be one of the first agencies to comply with the administration directive to fire employees. A spokesperson based in Washington, D.C., said Friday that the department “has released individuals in their probationary period of employment.”
Thirty U.S. Forest Service employees in Alaska were fired on Thursday, said Rob Arnold, business representative for the northwest region of the National Federation of Federal Employees. More than 20 of those employees worked in the Tongass National Forest, he said.
Around 30% of the roughly 700 Forest Service employees in Alaska are probationary, Arnold said. Some Alaska employees are on probation for two years.
About 30 people in full-time National Park Service positions in Alaska were fired, including many people who were hired in small gateway communities near Alaska’s national parks, according to a service employee who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Nationally, 1,000 National Park Service employees lost their jobs on Friday, according to the Coalition to Protect National Parks, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group.
Four of 17 employees from the Federal Highway Administration in Juneau were laid off Friday afternoon, according to someone familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The Alaska Department of Labor estimated that the state’s 15,200 civilian federal employees contributed $1.4 billion in wages to the Alaska economy in 2023 — not including the military.
“It is a big, important — by any measure — part of our economy,” said Dan Robinson, research chief at the state department.
The U.S. Department of Defense employs roughly 5,000 civilian employees in Alaska. But it’s unclear how many of those defense staff face layoffs.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, an ardent Trump supporter, did not respond to a series of questions on whether and how the state was preparing to respond to the impacts of the federal layoffs.
In response to questions on the extent of the layoffs, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan said he was in Germany and “can’t be reached for comment.”
Reader Comments(0)