The National Science Foundation fired nearly 170 workers in a Zoom call on Tuesday morning as part of the Trump administration’s agenda to reduce the federal workforce. The terminated workers, who were told their employment would end at 5 pm EST today, included those still under probation, but also workers who had already completed the requisite one-year probationary period to become permanent workers and at-will workers who were considered permanent employees.
Earlier this month, however, these permanent workers were suddenly told by NSF that their one-year probationary period should have been two years and they were no longer safe from being terminated.
The Trump administration has ordered federal agencies to fire nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained permanent status, thereby receiving civil service protections. But NSF workers who believed they were safe suddenly found themselves without jobs today.
The National Science Foundation is an independent agency within the federal government that provides grants to universities and other bodies in support of scientific and engineering research. The foundation’s grants account for about a quarter of all federal support to academic institutions for research. NSF’s grants were paused in late January due to a funding freeze, but the agency resumed issuing grants following a court order early this month.
Many of the people terminated on Tuesday work as program managers and experts who make decisions about funding by aligning research proposals with the right program and matching those proposals to the most qualified reviewers to assess them and make recommendations.
“It is hard to imagine this being accomplished successfully with automated algorithms,” one fired program manager told WIRED. “With fewer program officers to steward the evaluation process, the overwhelming concern is that it will become harder to identify and support the transformative but unconventional projects that could otherwise be game changers in terms of advancing scientific progress in the USA.”
All sources who spoke with WIRED requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
Sources say 168 workers received an email at 9:02 am EST this morning requesting their presence at a 10 am Zoom call for a “Meeting with NSF probationary employees.” Many workers did not receive the Zoom link, however, and missed the start of the call. At the meeting, they were told that their network access would be shut out at 1 pm and they had until 5 pm to clear out their desks, though workers were told that accommodations would be made to obtain things they weren’t able to clear out by 5 pm.
The termination action this morning also included all permanent employees who were designated as “at-will” workers. One terminated worker tells WIRED that they were a permanent federal employee working on a part-time basis, with an annual contract that was up for renewal in September.
The decision to terminate at-will employees came from NSF alone, not from the administration, NSF management told workers during the meeting. When asked whether at-will employees were just terminated out of fairness to the probationary workers, NSF management replied that the decision was “partly due to fairness, but that’s not all.”
The source says management then indicated that this was just the first step in subsequent termination rounds. The worker said they understood from this that the NSF believed at-will workers would be targeted in a subsequent round anyway, so they decided to terminate those workers now as well.
The fired program manager who spoke with WIRED came to NSF from academia on a temporary rotation position. Rotationary workers are those who work for a university but spend some of their time working for the NSF for a specific period. When a permanent position suddenly opened up during the worker’s rotation, NSF asked the worker to apply for it. They were hired in the summer of 2023 as a program manager, with a one-year trial period that ended in the summer of 2024. Paperwork that the worker shared with WIRED showed that the worker became a permanent employee at that time. But the worker says they and others were suddenly told recently that NSF had made a mistake.
During the Tuesday Zoom call, the worker says, staff from NSF human resources seemed to indicate they had been caught off guard by the decision. “They were watching their words carefully,” the worker says. “My sense is that they were caught unawares and probably somebody pointed to some federal statute somewhere that made them rethink how they had been doing things in the past.”
The program manager says management and HR personnel told workers on the call that they believed the foundation had discretion to decide the probationary period but were recently told that the foundation did not have that discretion and that the probationary period should have been two years for all workers.
Not everyone still on that probationary period got fired on Tuesday. The source tells WIRED that some workers who were very close to completing two years were not included in the terminations today. But workers were told that today’s action was just the first in what will be other termination actions at the foundation.
“There were exceptions made for people who were very close to completing their two-year period,” the worker says.
The temporary rotation worker and other workers at NSF were told in January that they could accept the so-called fork-in-the-road resignation deal that would allow them to continue to draw a salary through September if they resigned their positions, but the worker says that because he had completed his probationary period he believed his job was safe. Once they were told that the probationary period was in question, he says, he had only a couple of days to decide about the buyout, but the union had advised workers to not take it. Now he says his life and the lives of other workers have been thrown into chaos.
The at-will worker says that during a question-and-answer portion of the Zoom call, several workers brought up the fact that federal agencies were supposed to condition the terminations based on merit, but this didn’t seem to be happening. Workers have been receiving termination letters from the Office of Personnel Management saying that the government has determined they or their position no longer has value to the government.
“There were a number of employees who commented that they had nothing but exemplary performance reviews and director awards for meritorious services, so this notion that they were being let go [for poor performance] was ludicrous,” they said. “The answer was that they were simply copying the verbiage from OPM and that their value to the nation is no longer required.”