Last week, David Traver, the union’s chief steward representing Veterans Affairs employees in Alaska, warned legislators that Trump’s plans to reduce the federal workforce could put more than a thousand federal employees in Alaska — and their $88 million in wages — in the crosshairs.
And late this week, he appears to be right.
Starting Thursday afternoon and continuing today, the Trump administration has begun firing most probationary workers — workers who have been in their current position for less than a year — hitting everything from the NOAA and the Indian Health Service to park and forest rangers. Traver said more than 1,200 federal workers in Alaska are on probation, accounting for about 10% of the federal workforce.
“It’s Valentine’s Day massacre on feds,” one source told journalist Marisa Kabas, who was the first to break the story of the federal grant freeze memo.
Today, Traver met the grim news that the firings were, in fact, underway with a bit of gallows humor and uncorked anger at how federal employees have been treated in the era of Trump. He said the size, scope and impact of the layoffs are still uncertain as of Friday, but what he had heard was “chilling.”
And on top of the uncertainty, he said, federal workers are facing hateful and incendiary messages from Trump supporters gloating about the firings and threatening worse against federal workers and their families. He said it feels like a betrayal.
“That behavior was condoned by the White House,” he said, pointing to the slate of pardons for January 6 rioters, including those who assaulted police, that sent a message that anti-government behavior will go unpunished. “And now they’re firing people for doing our job. Where’s the pardon for being a federal employee?”
The mass firing of probationary workers has been rumored for several weeks, with the Trump administration collecting information and 200-character justifications for retaining employees from supervisors. It appears that efforts to spare essential employees were largely ignored, leading to the indiscriminate elimination of probationary employees throughout several branches of the federal government.
The scope and scale of the cuts are unclear, but firings have hit the Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Energy. Another round is expected to hit the Pentagon and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
AFGE National President Everett Kelley said they came without warning or opportunity for employees to defend themselves.
“This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office,” Kelley said. “Employees were given no notice, no due process, and no opportunity to defend themselves in a blatant violation of the principles of fairness and merit that are supposed to govern federal employment.”
In Alaska, Traver said that about a quarter of the federal probationary employees are veterans. Many work directly for Veterans Affairs, delivering specialized care to the state’s veteran population. Traver, who worked at the VA for three decades, said he’s particularly concerned about the impact on care for veterans, noting that many veterans suffer from PTSD that untrained providers can exacerbate.
“None of the federal employees came here to get rich,” he said. “They came to give back.”
Those cuts are also expected to hit probationary employees in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Alaska climatologist Brian Brettschneider said in a Bluesky thread will hit NOAA operations in the state particularly hard.
“Devastating. Hard to overstate how bad this FIRST STEP is. Here in Alaska, there is an outsized proportion of federal workers in their probationary period. Alaska is often the first stop in a career in federal service and typically has a large fraction of probationary workers,” he wrote. “As a small population state with a small university system, we rely on enticing people from other states to fill positions that cannot be filled organically.”
The Alaska Legislature has held several hearings to understand the impacts of the federal grant freeze and other funding interruptions by the Trump administration, and the results have painted a gloomy and frustrating picture. Even single-day delays, such as we saw around the initial grant freeze, can lead to delays or outright cancellation of critical projects that require, said House Judiciary Committee Chair Andrew Gray.
Gray organized a hearing last week where Traver was one of several groups to testify about the uncertainty and costs associated with the delays. He said he also plans to have state agencies in front of the committee to discuss their impacts.
Gray, who is also a veteran, said the scope and impact the cuts will have on federal services will be so widely felt and unpopular that he hopes it will wake politicians across the country up to what’s happening, particularly in red states.
“The federal government is so deeply intertwined in the fabric of this country that it will be a catastrophe,” he said. “It can’t happen.”
It’s unclear how widespread the latest round of firings has been or will be in Alaska, but there have been reports that probationary park and forest rangers have been fired. The Alaska Current has reached out to other federal worker unions to better understand the impacts — federal agencies aren’t exactly reliable anymore — and will provide an update when available.
As of right now, uncertainty seems to be the name of the game, and it could cause major fallout for the state. At the hearing in the House Judiciary Committee last week, several groups said the state might need to be a fallback if critical federal services fall apart. That could be difficult, if not impossible. Federal funding flows to just about every corner of the state in one form or another, and the state is already facing such severe budget problems that they’re already considering hiking oil taxes to slow the rate of school closures.
And that’s just looking at the state budget.
Traver said that the 1,200 probationary employees in the state account for about $88 million in annual pay, which will vanish from the economy because of the firings.
“Alaska’s economy has two parts,” he said, “oil and federal employees.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
