Last September, Mary and her partner moved from Oregon to Colorado by car. On the way, they camped in Idaho and took a detour through Yellowstone National Park. They passed bison grazing on the side of the road, saw Old Faithful shoot into the sky, and, when it snowed, took refuge in an R.V. and baked a frozen pizza. Mary’s love of nature, kindled in the back yard of her childhood home, had inspired her to become a scientist. (She asked that I use only her first name.) She was enamored with volcanoes and eventually pursued a doctorate, which focussed on the geochemistry of the East African Rift. At twenty-eight, she was finishing her dissertation and about to start a job with the U.S. Geological Survey. “Being a geologist, you can do a lot of different things in oil or mining or academia,” she told me. “But I always liked the idea of doing science motivated by what the public wants.”
The U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) was founded in 1879, amid a surge in industrial manufacturing and faith in scientific progress. It was charged with the “classification of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain.” Now it conducts satellite mapping, tracks earthquakes, and monitors mineral resources, wildlife, and water. It is one of eleven bureaus under the Department of the Interior, but has no regulatory powers. Mary would be working at the Denver Federal Center, a six-hundred-and-twenty-three-acre campus that was originally a livestock ranch and hosted an ordnance plant during the Second World War. The U.S.G.S. building there looked like it hadn’t changed much since then. Mary’s lab had a broken sink and was cluttered with decades’ worth of beakers and hot plates. Her office was in the corner of a windowless floor that frequently flooded. She tried to dress it up a bit, with a used standing desk and a green velvet armchair from home, which her partner nicknamed the “IKEA dream chair.” When Mary was being hired, she was told, in three rounds of interviews, that a new, state-of-the-art U.S.G.S. facility would soon be built down the road, at the Colorado School of Mines, with funding from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. “That was a big sell,” she said.
She joined a team that studies “critical minerals,” a category of metals that are essential to industry and vulnerable to kinks in the global supply chain. Critical minerals are used in planes, electric cars, smartphones, and many other technologies. Some, such as aluminum, lithium, and cobalt, are better known (and easier to pronounce) than others: dysprosium, fluorspar, ruthenium, ytterbium. They’re often dispersed in small amounts in sections of underlying rock. When a mining company locates an area that contains a critical mineral, it must excavate and grind up that rock, then separate it into component parts for analysis. Mary’s job was to keep a global inventory of these components, in the form of little jars of fine powders, called “reference materials.” A mining company or fellow-researcher might contact her to purchase a jar, at cost, of Reykjavík Iceland Basalt or Knippa Texas Nephelinite (both a hundred and thirty-five dollars) for purposes of calibration and comparison. But Mary was only permitted to ship the materials to certain countries, for reasons of national security, she supposed. She liked helping other scientists “know that they’re measuring something correctly.” Her little jars were the geochemical equivalent of the original kilogram, a metal cylinder that sits in a vault outside Paris. Maintaining measurement standards is a behind-the-scenes task few private entities have the incentive to perform. “My job’s comically boring,” Mary told me. “But I really liked it.”
Mary described her role as largely self-directed. She was constantly trying to make improvements at U.S.G.S., while finishing her dissertation on nights and weekends. One day, she came across a journal article that laid out a method for growing especially pure, regular calcium carbonate using agar and a U-shaped test tube. Such crystals would be handy in her work, so she rummaged for supplies in the lab and set up two U-shaped test tubes side by side. Within a week or two, sparkly white bits appeared in the solution at the base of the tubes. Another time, she took a Python coding class on her own initiative. “Before any data that was generated from labs went out to people, it had to be reviewed,” she said. “You have to do all these checklists of, like, Did they do this on the instrument? Does this Excel sheet have the units?” She began to write Python programs to standardize and automate this quality assurance.
Her work was so quiet and fundamental—to academia and industry, all over the world—that Mary believed her job would be safe, even after President Donald Trump started making cuts to the federal workforce in January. There was also the fact that Trump seemed to be fixated on critical minerals. On his first day back in office, he issued an executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” that referenced U.S.G.S. and encouraged federal support for “critical mineral projects.” He was also trying to broker access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits, such as lithium, manganese, and graphite.
But, by early February, Mary heard that the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human-resources arm, had required the Department of the Interior to submit a list of probationary employees: those less than a year or two into their jobs. She Googled whether she could “get fired randomly,” and read up on the required procedures for a federal reduction in force. Then, on February 13th, she read an article that forecast widespread firings of government workers the next day. Panic spread in the group chats and social-media channels shared by workers at U.S.G.S., the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. For many scientists and nature lovers, these were rare, sought-after positions—“my dream job,” more than one Interior worker told me.
On Valentine’s Day, Mary’s phone rang. “Welp. Just got a call from my boss,” she texted her “🌎👩🔬👑Geo Gals” chat. “I’m laid off.” Her friends replied, “No,” and “NO,” and “NO!!!” A few hours later, Trump issued another executive order focussed on critical minerals, which established a National Energy Dominance Council. Mary had taken the day off to finish her dissertation, and spent the evening with her partner, their cat, and their aging dog. The couple had been fixing up the house: they hung peel-and-stick wallpaper in the kitchen and painted the office a pleasing green. Mary thought about the garden. “I planted garlic in my yard in September, and garlic takes a year to grow,” she said. “I was, like, Oh, God, I might be moving.” The following week, when she went to collect her belongings from the U.S.G.S. building, she found a note scrawled on torn scrap paper and taped to an office door:
“Not sure who put it there,” she said.
After Mary received her official notice of firing, she changed her status on Microsoft Teams: “Out of office — In memoriam: Sept 2024-Feb2025.” Her immediate predecessor had done the job for more years than Mary had been alive. “I don’t know how long I would’ve stayed, but definitely a while,” she told me. “I calculated when I could retire. I think I jinxed it.”
Some twenty-five thousand federal workers, most of them probationary, were fired around the same time as Mary. Their termination e-mails were short, impersonal, and, in many cases, dishonest. The Administration told these employees that they had “failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs,” regardless of their actual records. At U.S.G.S. and other Interior agencies, thousands of emerging scientists saw their careers cut short. And, in fields such as geology and ecology, many were women. “My graduate program, my cohort, was ten women and five men,” Mary said. “Participation was being broadened among younger people.”
Workers, unions, and states filed lawsuits over the mass firings. Mary heard rumors that the Interior agencies might be ordered to bring people back, but nothing was certain, so she started to apply for jobs in the private sector. There was an aerospace position that paid twice as much as U.S.G.S., and a mining venture that promised a novel application of A.I. Mary was not enthusiastic. She felt like a “hypocrite”; Trump and Elon Musk had told federal workers to improve themselves by seeking work in the private sector. “One of my applications said something like ‘Do you commit to signing an N.D.A. to protect trade secrets?’ ” she told me. “I was, like, ‘Oh, God.’ My whole thing was, I really loved that science is for the people.”
When she saw her mother’s neighbor celebrate, on Instagram, Trump’s rooting out of alleged waste and fraud, Mary felt angry. “Is the solution really asking a person who knows nothing about these industries to arbitrarily cut things that make no sense?” she D.M.’d the neighbor. “Does it make sense that I got fired today despite being hired to advance critical mineral supplies as directed by Donald Trumps recent executive order?” Mary wondered how her crystals in the U-shaped test tubes were doing. She called her representatives in Congress. “I’d kind of ramble,” she told me. Her script was “Hi, I just got fired. I’m calling to advocate that our representatives take action on Elon Musk’s purge of the government.”
Last week, just before an interview for a private-sector job she wasn’t sure she wanted, Mary got a text message from her former supervisor at U.S.G.S. “You should receive an email today rescinding your removal from federal service,” he wrote. He had limited information, but told her that “the response window could be fairly short.” Judges in California and Maryland had ordered the temporary rehiring of many thousands of probationary workers who had been summarily fired. (Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene.) Mary felt overwhelmed, tossed in a current. “I don’t know if I’ll get brought back and have to leave again,” she told me. But she accepted the offer. The mass reinstatements were as shambolic as the mass firings had been. Some employees were notified by e-mail; some by text; some on conference calls via Microsoft Teams. Some workers were rehired and allowed to resume work. Others were technically rehired but put on administrative leave, which meant that they would likely be fired again soon, this time in accordance with federal rules. I spoke with one fired probationary worker at the National Park Service who never received a reinstatement notice at all.
The e-mail that Mary got didn’t mention her probationary status. It was the nature of her job—the critical minerals—that apparently saved her. “I am rescinding the letter/termination action,” the form e-mail from an agency official read. “Your position should have been exempt for the purposes of either National Security, Public Safety, or Energy Dominance.” She was allowed to return right away, with back pay, but decided to take a few days of unpaid leave to readjust. She was tired. “The idea of immediately returning to the office is very jarring,” she told me. “I assumed I’d be part of the group getting reinstated to only get fired again.” It was hard not to feel survivor’s guilt. But, she said, “I’ll be at work on Monday, and will just keep my head down.” ♦
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