The U.S. Department of Agriculture building is seen in Washington, Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024. Many USDA researchers working in the Pacific Northwest are fired after the Trump administration’s firings of “probationary employees."
Jose Luis Magana / AP
Francisco Gonzalez, 36, said he has a new house, furniture and a car to pay for. Plus, his wife and two young daughters.
“Now we’re stuck with these massive bills and no job,” Gonzalez said.
Like hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the country, Gonzalez recently lost his government job as a scientist because of the Trump administration’s firings of “probationary employees,” meaning more recent hires or employees that had more recently switched into new roles. Many researchers across the Northwest have been riffed — from Corvallis, Oregon, to Prosser, Washington — affecting big-money crops from cherries to potatoes.
Gonzalez was employed as a research horticulturist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was stationed at the Washington State University’s Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center in Prosser. He focused on hops in his position.
He studied hydromulch — a type of mulch that keeps plants’ roots more moist — and its effects on weeds and temperature fluctuations. He was phenotyping two cultivars — or new types of plants that had unique characteristics. And he was also studying new diverse varieties of hops for their performance in the fields.
“Well, my wife was sitting next to me when I got the email. She saw it at the same time I did,” he said. “I just didn’t know what to tell her. I think it’s the hardest thing we’ve faced together. And we went through grad school with two little girls. Telling my wife that it was going to be fine was the hardest thing.”
Gonzalez had been employed just a couple of months shy of the three-year mark that would have ended his probationary period. He received the email from the USDA at about 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 13.
“It was devastating,” he said. “I thought this was my forever job.”
Many of these people were told their performance was an issue, when there haven’t been records in their reviews of such problems. Gonzalez said this also happened to him.
Gonzalez added that he grew up in the Columbia Basin, amid the orchards that his father worked in.
“He would take me with him to work,” he said. “I always had a curious mind … that could solve serious issues. I’ve always been curious about the world, but especially about plants.”
Two of his fresh publications will likely be posted after his departure from USDA.
“I would love to tell a message to the hop industry,” Gonzalez said. “It was the privilege of my life. And I know they have a great future ahead. They were also kind. And I am just so grateful I had that opportunity to work for them.”
Industry
The U.S. hop industry is upset over Gonzalez’s firing and that of his tech. The hop industry said it advocated for a USDA horticultural scientist for several years before funding was appropriated to support the position.
In the three years since Gonzalez’s arrival, the USDA-Agricultural Research Service invested over $1.6 million in establishing the Hop Stress Physiology Lab at WSU’s Prosser worksite. The industry itself contributed another $300,000 to support the program and buy infrastructure and equipment like a hop picker, a kiln to dry the hops, and the building and planting of a 6-acre hop yard.
The U.S. hop industry provides about 40% of the world’s hops. And the Yakima Valley produces about 30% of the world’s hops, according to Maggie Elliot, with the Washington Hop Commission.
“This development is a devastating hit to public agricultural research,” Elliot wrote in an email. “An estimated nine out of 30 federal workers were terminated at WSU-IAREC (an ag research center in Prosser).”
The termination of Gonzalez came as a shock to the industry, Elliot said. These workers are “your friends, your community, your neighbors,” she said.
“Top growers helped him plant his hop yard and do his drip irrigation,” she said. “Our industry has worked together to help him develop his research capacity. That’s because we believed in the value of the research would provide in his entire career. To have all that gone in an instant is devastating.”
Now, without a researcher, Elliot is not sure that the industry will keep investing in the equipment and infrastructure. She says this is a big loss for the industry, which has significant challenges that need top scientists.
“He was looking at irrigation deficits,” she said. “We depend on irrigation water coming from snowpack from the Washington Cascades. And our snowpacks the last few years have been really volatile. We need to grow top-yielding hop plants with less water. He was performing water stress work.”
‘Seed corn’
Doug Walsh, a professor of entomology at the WSU Prosser research station, says the federal employees who were fired were some of the youngest scientists with great careers ahead of them.
“That’s the folks really working hard to get their programs started,” he said. “They’re on the hustle.”
Walsh said he worked with Gonzalez to submit a recent paper to the American Society Of Brewing Chemists.
He says this type of position is only funded through federal funding. Strapped universities and private industry can’t easily make up the research, he said.
“The shame of it is, there is no other organization in the public domain that could have the capacity to fill a position like that,” Walsh said.
As a senior scientist, Walsh said it was great to work with young scientists who could spend time publishing new reports for the industry that Walsh would likely not have time for. He said he loved mentoring eager scientists like Gonzalez. According to Walsh, WSU and USDA scientists worked very closely together to further research for the industries depending on them.
Walsh added that by losing these scientists out of the pool now, they could be losing the programs they were working on — like hop research. “It’s burning, or eating, our seed corn,” Walsh said. “They were our future.”
Fear
Some of the remaining USDA scientists who still have jobs are living with fear for their own positions.
Many USDA officials we’ve contacted across the Northwest have refused to go on record. Additionally, many commodity group employees, like industry fruit groups, also remain silent.
Some off the record said they worried about retribution, or further cuts or damage.
Arielle Cooley, a professor of biology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, said she and two other science professors are organizing a local event, coordinating with a larger group called “Stand Up For Science,” on March 7.
“The science that happens in the USA is a major funding driver,” Cooley said. “These cuts are leaving scientists in a very dark way. We are hurting our future scientists. My students want to be doctors, health care providers and scientists. They are looking for research opportunities, and they need these research opportunities for their future well-being.”
The panel discussion event will take place on March 7 at noon, at Maxey Auditorium, 413 Boyer Ave. in Walla Walla.
“Every scientist that I know in Walla Walla knows people that have been suddenly fired,” Cooley said. “They all know promising scientists that have been pulled off of projects. If you abandon projects in the middle, that’s an enormous waste of resources. These people are not going to continue the project, and maybe not in science.”
Anna King is a reporter with Northwest Public Broadcasting. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.
