Ana Vaz was called “exceptional” with “a remarkable level of productivity” in her last performance review at NOAA, then told in her termination email from the federal government that her ability, skills and knowledge “do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”Tribune-Star/David Kronke
A month after being terminated, Ana Vaz still has no idea if she still has a job.
“I was — I am — I don’t even know,” she told the Tribune- Star. “We’ve been fired, rehired, fired, rehired.”
Vaz, who worked as a fish biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - also known as NOAA - since last June, is one of tens of thousands of federal employees throughout the country enduring a similar ordeal — they’ve been terminated, only to have a judge issue a restraining order against the decision, only to see the government dragging its feet in returning them to work.
As a result, Vaz has not received termination paperwork that would allow her to file for unemployment, nor has she been informed that she has been reinstated, though she received an email telling her “You will be reinstated” a while back.
She has not received a paycheck since the last week she worked.
“It’s been very difficult,” said Vaz, whose husband is a professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. “It’s almost a full-time job, just trying to figure out what’s happening under these conditions.”
Vaz laughed, and did so frequently during the interview, though the situation she’s living through is puzzling and stressful. She showed an app on her phone that measures stress levels: Hers trended ever higher until the day she was terminated, then slowly inched back down.
Vaz was called “exceptional” with “a remarkable level of productivity” in her last performance review at NOAA, then told in her termination email from the federal government that her ability, skills and knowledge “do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”
“One of the red flags is, there’s usually a transition that goes on when another president is elected — what we heard was a transition team didn’t exist,” Vaz said. Documents were put together by NOAA employees but there was no transition team to receive them.
She has been concerned about her employment since Trump was sworn into office.
“On Inauguration Day, there were a flurry of executive orders, and one of the memos that came through was a list of probationary employees, and that’s when I became very concerned because I was a probationary employee,” she said.
“Our leadership was not concerned, because they had reported that the probationary employees were all excellent performers doing congressionally mandated work and that their positions were justified.”
Vaz received Elon Musk’s first email asking employees to list five things they had done in the past week.
“It was very confusing because when that happened because we have confidentiality agreements for a lot of the data we deal with,” she said. “Some people do secret things that have national security risks.” She sent a reply to her supervisor. Employees were initially told not to respond to the email; now, they receive a similar one on a weekly basis.
On Feb. 15, the first round of government employees were terminated. “When the first firings began, we knew it was just a matter of time before they got to us,” Vaz said.
Which they did on Feb. 27. “We got an email at 3:40 p.m. — while a judge was issuing injunctions regarding previous terminations,” she said. The emails were not signed, but included the name of the acting NOAA secretary who was on leave that day.
“We were given one hour, and we would lose access to our computers,” Vaz recalled. “I was already prepared — I had downloaded everything I could in documentation and backed up all my drives.”
In Vaz’s office, 17 of 20 people were told they had been terminated. Some of her colleagues were distraught “I was very calm because I saw that coming, but my co-workers were crying and trying to figure out what we needed to get and our next steps,” Vaz said. “It was very chaotic.”
On March 13, another judge ruled against the terminations and issued a temporary restraining order forcing the government to rehire employees.
“So we were actually never terminated, but then we were rehired,” Vaz said. “We never got proper termination notification from the government. We got an email saying, ‘You will be reinstated,’ but we never got an email saying ‘You are being reinstated today,’ so we’re in this limbo.”
She participates in virtual meetings with her colleagues in which they attempt to make sense of the legal and financial maze they’re in.
“Our thinking was we would get a check for back pay, but we weren’t sure,” Vaz said. “It’s been very, very chaotic, and that’s why we have this group, because all these lawsuits are difficult for us to navigate.”
As Vaz laments her situation, she’s equally concerned about weather forecasting’s future accuracy.
“We’re going to have tornados, and we need to be able to forecast them,” she said. “If we have better models of ocean forecasts, we’re going to have better weather forecasts, which is particularly important for states in hurricane and tornado areas.”
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