James' World 2

The agency didn’t have to fire its experts but decided to in the interest of fairness, a top NSF official told staffers in an emotionally charged hybrid meeting Tuesday morning at its Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters.

“The removal of experts was completely at the agency’s discretion. Because if we’re asked to remove probationers, then we also need to remove at-will employees,” Micah Cheatham, NSF’s chief management officer, said at the tense and tearful hour-long meeting, according to a transcript obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News.

“This is the first of many forthcoming workforce reductions,” he added.

NSF was created by Congress in 1950 to ensure U.S. leadership in science and engineering. The agency now provides roughly a quarter of federal support to America’s colleges and universities for basic research.

E&E News previously reported that NSF expects to cut up to half of its 1,500-person workforce. Scientists and Democratic lawmakers fear that staff losses of that scale could effectively break the nation’s research and innovation pipeline, with disastrous consequences for the U.S. economy and American citizens.

The mass firing at one of the nation’s leading funders of scientific research comes as Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency established by President Donald Trump, races to slash federal spending with the help of the Office of Personnel Management. Musk’s group has initially targeted foreign aid and racial diversity efforts, but nearly all agencies have been impacted by cuts, or expect them to come soon.

A few probationary employees whose work NSF leaders determined was essential were spared from the firings.

“We asked who was mission critical and more than half of people were identified,” Cheatham said. “That was too many.”

Fired NSF staffers were instructed to stop working by 1 p.m. Tuesday, at which point they would be locked out of the agency’s computer network. They had until the end of the day to clean out their desks.

To avoid having the stain of a firing on their resumes, staffers were told they could resign. But then they would not be eligible for unemployment payments.

The announcement prompted outrage, confusion, and concern from people at the meeting, resulting in a string of scathing all-staff emails from impacted workers.