The dust is still settling after the federal government abruptly fired thousands of probationary employees last week in the name of efficiency. And Alaska, which was home to more than 11,000 federal workers last year, wasn’t spared.
When Jillian Jablonski joined the Chugach National Forest as a fisheries biologist last year, she saw an opportunity to blend her passion for fish habitat conservation with the stability of a federal job. Her hiring process was a long one – taking roughly eight months and encompassing a background check, drug testing and fingerprinting.
“I was really proud to represent the Chugach National Forest,” she said. “And really, there's also — I don't feel like this exists anymore – but when I accepted the position, the federal government definitely presented additional job security and stability.”
But last week, just three weeks shy of the end of her probationary employment period, Jablonski became one of thousands of federal employees abruptly fired from their positions.
She’s called Alaska home for more than a decade, and holds a master’s degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage. While working for the forest over the last year, she focused on streamlining fish movement through culverts and targeted invasive elodea in Crescent Lake.
“I was going to be the field lead – Forest Service field lead – for that this summer,” she said.
As recently as a few weeks ago, Jablonski says she received a positive performance review from her supervisor, who indicated they planned to retain her once her probationary period was up.
But around the same time, Jablonski was one of an estimated 2 million federal employees who received the “Fork in the Road” email from the federal Office of Personnel Management. The email invited her to resign and be paid through September, or risk being fired. Jablonski says she thought about accepting out of fear for the future of probationary positions.
“In the end, I did not accept it because I didn't want to resign from my position, and I felt that there was no legal basis for me to be terminated from my position,” she said.
Jablonski is a single mom. She’s already looking for a new job but is worried about her prospects. In a social media post shared last week – which has since gone somewhat viral – she describes living mostly paycheck-to-paycheck.
“When I finally got the call, it was really difficult,” she said. “You know, it's scary to be unemployed.”
Amid the chaos, Jablonski says a small part of her is relieved to be done with what she says had become a mentally taxing situation.
“Being made to feel like the work we did as federal employees was not beneficial – I think that's a really hard environment to be in, when you're made to feel like your work – that you're worthless and your work is worthless on a regular basis,” she said.
Alice Bandeian was also fired from her position with the Chugach National Forest last week. Like Jablonski, Bandeian says she went through a monthslong hiring process before being brought on as a hydrologist last fall.
Staff aren’t doing as much field work in the winter, Bandeian says. But she helped work on the Forest Service’s ongoing efforts to restore Resurrection Creek, near Hope. That’s on top of monitoring stream temperatures and installing groundwater wells.
“We know fish populations are very dependent on several factors within streams,” she said. “You know, turbidity, water quality, temperature, and we're monitoring temperature and using that data to see trends over time and see how it could be potentially impacting our fish population.”
She says she and other Forest Service employees had heard through the grapevine about the Trump administration’s interest in federal probationary employees.
Some of the more senior staff told her not to worry. She says they doubted the forest service would be hit as hard as other agencies due to Trump’s stated interest in resource extraction in Alaska, including logging.
But Bandeian says she knew what was coming when she got a call from her supervisor late last week.
“It just felt very hurtful and erratic,” she said. “You know, they're going after people blindly, without much consideration as to what is really going to help in the long run.”
At the time she got her own “Fork in the Road” email, Bandeian wasn't interested in a buyout.
“I worked really hard to get this job,” she said. “I went through and stood through a lot of waiting and challenging back-and-forth if this position was actually going to go through. And I felt personally that, if there's a way to keep this job, I'm going to fight for it.”
Bandeian says she’s trying to stay in Southcentral, and that she’s received support from other workers and her union, the National Federation of Federal Employees. That group is just one of the labor organizations already challenging what it says are the illegal firings of probationary employees and the “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation offer.
The layoffs, she says, are going to further strain a workforce that was already understaffed. And she says those impacts will be felt once visitors start pouring into the state this summer.
As of Tuesday evening, a judge was still actively considering the legality of the mass layoffs.
