Francisco “Paco” Gonzalez grew up in the Yakima Valley and Columbia Basin, close to the region’s thriving agricultural economy.

He always wanted a career in agriculture and he worked his way up, earning degrees from Columbia Basin College and Washington State University and getting an orchard management position.

But he wanted to give back to his community. In 2021, Gonzalez got a Ph.D. in horticulture from WSU – he was dead set on agricultural research and finding new ways to help the industry.

“I’ve always had my heart set in working for the people,” he said. “I’ve had my heart in being a public servant.”

Gonzalez got that job in 2022, when he began working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at a multimillion-dollar lab studying hops physiology, specifically how the key Yakima Valley crop responds to drought and water stress.

On Feb. 13, all of his work ground to a halt. Gonzalez received an email notifying him his job was terminated, fired in sweeping federal layoffs 42 days before his probationary period ended.

“That was heartbreaking to hear. I’ve given this industry my all,” Gonzalez said. “I consider this to be wrongful termination.”

Federal firings and job cuts have reverberated across the country as President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency turn their attention to the federal workforce.

Those decisions have reached Central Washington, where firings have hit the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Forest Service, Veterans Affairs and the National Park Service, among other federal agencies.

DOGE and billionaire business owner Elon Musk have said they are remaking the federal workforce to cut costs and increase efficiency.

However, concerns have sprouted up on both sides of the political spectrum in Congress, and lawmakers are worried people with critical experience and expertise are being pushed out.

On the ground in the Yakima Valley, federal employees who have recently been fired are frustrated by what they call wrongful terminations. They have committed their lives and careers to helping their communities, they said, and they are now abruptly being told to leave.

Their work, including critical research for Yakima’s important agricultural industry and management of local forests, is being left to languish, they said.

Zooming out

A Wednesday report from the Associated Press indicated that thousands of federal workers have been fired, including 2,000 USDA employees and 1,000 National Park Service employees, as well as thousands of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

It’s difficult to track how many people have been fired and which agencies are conducting these terminations. The AP report said no official numbers are available. The Yakima Herald-Republic contacted the public affairs officer for the Pacific West Region of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service and was referred to the agency's Washington headquarters, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Information is coming from federal workers and those who have recently been fired, along with industry groups who work with them.

Layoffs have hit a joint USDA and Washington State University research facility in Prosser, where Gonzalez worked. Nine of the 30 federal employees were fired, according to Maggie Elliot. Elliot is the communications director for Yakima-based Hop Growers of America, which collaborated with the USDA at that lab, including with researchers such as Gonzalez.

In a news conference Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said terminations have left the Hanford nuclear cleanup site near Richland understaffed. She added that forest rangers, Veterans Affairs employees and workers at the Bonneville Power Administration – which is funded by ratepayers and not federal dollars – had been fired.

Most of those workers are probationary employees . Federal jobs tend to be secure due to strong worker protections. For that reason, workers in new positions, even those who may have been promoted into it, have a probationary period.

This allows them to be more easily terminated if they do not meet expectations. The probationary period can be one year or several – it varies by position.

However, many of the workers who are being terminated say they are meeting or exceeding expectations. Kyle Shields was an assistant forest manager employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but who worked in a program jointly managed by the BIA and the Yakama Nation.

He is an enrolled tribal citizen and worked for 14 years in forest management as a Yakama Nation employee before he was promoted into a federal role two years ago. That made him a probationary employee. Shields said he had never received a work evaluation showing anything other than that he was exceeding expectations.

On Feb. 14, he was sent a letter saying his knowledge, skills and abilities did not fit the job and he was fired. He had been working in the forestry program for 20 years.

“All of my appraisals since becoming a federal employee show I was exceeding expectations,” he said. “That’s a lot of the frustration I’ve seen across the nation.”

Shields, Gonzalez and other federal workers have said they received no offer of severance pay or continued benefits.

Fired and frustrated

Many former federal workers said they took their jobs out of a sense of duty. They were there to help their communities, they said.

“My mind wasn’t on the money, it was on the public good,” Gonzalez said.

Research for private companies can be patented and restricted. USDA agricultural research must meet a high standard of accuracy and has to be publicly available. It cannot be restricted, so all hops growers can use it.

“That is public, it’s peer reviewed and it has to be accessible to anyone,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez recently published research showing the effects of pauses in irrigation on hops growth. It focused on what happens to the plant during emergency irrigation shutoffs and how to mitigate negative effects.

Shields said the forestry work being done at the Yakama Nation was unique. In the short term, he said, he managed sustainable timber production and his team worked to lower wildfire risk.

In the long run, Shields said, the program was meant to both produce timber and preserve the important cultural resources of the Yakama Nation’s forests, including hunting and gathering food.

“I’ve only wanted to work for the Yakama Nation because they manage their forest unlike anywhere else in the world,” Shields said. “I wanted to show that you could manage a forest to meet economic objectives while doing all these other things that don’t make any money.”

He had grown up dreaming of a tribal job, he said, and called his decision to move into the federal workforce in 2023 a difficult one. But it was an opportunity to take on more responsibility, plus the job was supposed to be more secure.

The nature of the firings meant that Shields and Gonzalez left most of their work unfinished. Shields was working on several contracts and managed timber sales.

“Nobody else has all those notes,” he said. “They’re going to have to figure it out.”

Gonzalez said he and his technician were fired.

“I have trials out in the field that will not continue; they will just end,” he said.

Veterans and Forest Service

Similar stories are being shared across the state, including at the news conference hosted by Murray.

Raphael Garcia, a veteran and Veterans Affairs employee in the Puget Sound area, was working to process a massive backlog of veterans claims. He was hired less than a year ago.

Garcia said he spent his last day helping his colleague process claims because he was locked out of his account.

“It’s disheartening. I was drawn to the mission. I would take pay cuts. I work outside hours without pay,” Garcia said.

Gregg Bafundo is also a veteran and was lead forest ranger for the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest, where he has worked for nine seasons. He’s a Tonasket resident, but his work drew him to other parts of the state. He is a wildland firefighter and worked on the Retreat Fire near White Pass last year.

Bafundo’s agency was in the process of hiring more firefighters and training for the 2025 fire season.

“I’m a patriot. I will work for the American people however I can,” he said. “We loved being able to look our fellow citizen in the eye and say ‘We got you.’”

Washington’s congressional delegation

Republicans and Democrats have voiced worries about the firings.

Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, represents much of Central Washington in Congress. He agreed with the Trump administration that the federal workforce and spending needs to be reduced, but was concerned about how it’s being done.

“A strong, well trained federal workforce is essential, and I have communicated to the Trump administration that there should be a more nuanced approach to terminations and furloughs,” Newhouse said in an emailed statement. “We must ensure that positions critical to public safety, energy and research are maintained.”

He added that he was concerned about “the unintended consequences of these workforce reductions will have long-lasting implications at Hanford, PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), and BPA (Bonneville Power Administration).”

Murray, a Democrat, was forceful in her criticism of the Trump administration and called out Musk and DOGE, which has led the cuts.

“What we saw was Elon Musk and Donald Trump go into departments with no idea of an end game,” she said. “It is ham-handed, it is dangerous and it is mean.”

Murray said members of Congress have not been able to get information from federal agencies about the firings, which is critical to congressional oversight. She believes the firings were without merit.

“We know Trump’s firing spree was not about merit because they are targeting new employees, people that have been recognized for outstanding performance and people who were recently promoted who are now getting fired from their newly earned jobs,” she said.

Effects in agriculture

Criticism has not been confined to the public sector.

Elliot, who works for Hop Growers of America, said the industry prizes its partnerships with USDA researchers because hop farmers tend to be smaller and don’t have the resources to conduct their own research projects.

Dr. Francisco Gonzalez and technician Brandon Sandoval worked researching hops for the USDA Agricultural Research Service near Prosser. Both were fired this month.

Gonzalez was part of a 10-year research project launched in 2022 that included $1.6 million in federal investment and $300,000 from the hop companies and professional associations.

“Personnel conduct fundamental scientific inquiries to strengthen crop production systems across the United States,” Elliot said. “Hops and other ag industries lost key scientists and support staff -- public servants performing critical research for our local producers. Public agricultural research is estimated to generate $20 in economic benefit to every taxpayer dollar spent.”

Elliot called the terminations devastating and said Gonzalez’s research on water stress would be vital to the long-term resiliency of the industry.

But it’s not just hops. USDA researchers working on wine grapes response to wildfire smoke were also terminated.

“We have lost research and dedicated scientific programs that focus on wildfire smoke exposure,” said Colleen Frei, executive director of the Washington Winegrowers Association. “This will have a significant impact on us.”

The federal layoffs also hit researchers focused on education and research around water stress.

Frei said much of the federal agricultural research was closely linked with state and private work. There is lots of collaboration and combination of funding sources and research, she said, so when federal funding is removed, the holes in research can stretch beyond federal programs.

“A lot of this federal funding and work dovetailed with state work,” Frei said. “We were leveraging federal and state and there was private funding that went into this, but they were working in tandem.”

Now, industry experts are scrambling to understand the fallout from the mass federal firings.

“Right now, things are uncertain as to how we can continue that momentum and what it might look like into the future,” Frei said.

Uncertain futures

The fired federal workers face uncertain futures.

“I moved here, I got a mortgage in this area because this was supposed to be a forever job,” said Gonzalez, who is the primary provider for his wife and two children.

Shields said he feels fortunate – his wife has a stable job and they will be able to make ends meet. Now, though, he faces an insecure future. His work in forestry is specific. The federal government is one of the largest employers of foresters, Shields said, but it’s not hiring right now.

Shields, Gonzalez, Garcia and Bafundo all said they want to keep working in jobs on behalf of their communities.

Shields and Gonzalez said the layoffs violated a level of trust.

Gonzalez said he has seen inefficiencies and problems in the federal government that could be cut. He’s all for that, he said, but his job was important to local agriculture and industry. He had committed to it fully.

Shields said the dishonesty about performance-based firings cut deep.

“If they’re willing to lie about that to fire workers, who is to say they won’t lie about other things?” he said.

Shields and Gonzalez called for better congressional protections for federal workers. That, they both said, would be an important condition if they were to come back to their jobs.

“It’s hard building a career I’d always had in mind,” Shields said. “And having it taken away.”

Kyle Shields is the brother of Yakima Herald-Republic newsroom staffer Sara Rae Shields, who was not involved in writing or editing this article.