Madyson Miller's Florida childhood was almost like a crash course in marine biology. She grew up going to the beach and going with her grandparents to see Shamu—"which I obviously realize now is not the kind of value system I have when it comes to animal care," Miller caveats. But she wasn't sure if she wanted to pursue science—she dreamed of being on Broadway—until a teacher told her she had what it takes.
Miller, a first-generation college student, initially struggled in university. "I was a terrible test-taker, and my first year my grades just were not great," she said. "I really thought, like, I'm not going to be able to do this." But then a professor offered Miller the chance to work in her lab studying the environmental DNA—genetic material shed by animals in their environment—of creatures like lionfish and salamanders. This experience in the lab cemented Miller's passion for biology, as well as her confidence that she could make it in the field.
She went on to study birds in Mississippi and invasive seagrass ecology in the U.S. Virgin Islands. But Miller realized something was missing. "It felt very much one-dimensional, like I was just doing science," she said. So she started looking for opportunities in policy, where she could shape species management and impact larger decisions.
Miller joined the U.S. Youth Action Council for the United Nations Ocean Decade, which advised the international initiative on what young people wanted to see out of ocean legislation. Later, she joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a Knauss Fellow—a program for graduate students interested in national ocean policy—then worked as a federal contractor for a year and a half. Last August, Miller joined NOAA full-time as a program analyst for the Research International Activities Office. There, Miller led NOAA's involvement in the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, or the Ocean Decade, an international initiative spanning 2021 to 2030 that aims for a more resilient, sustainable ocean.
Miller was first fired on Feb. 27 as a part of the mass layoffs directed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, then briefly reinstated amid legal challenges, and finally "re-fired" in April. Miller and I spoke about what the U.S. breach of trust means for our international partnerships, the valuable data that comes from storytelling, and how an underfunded NOAA threatens us all.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I would love to hear a little bit more about how you became interested in ocean science.
I grew up on Shamu. I grew up going to the beach. I'm from Florida. I grew up watching Steve Irwin wrestle crocodiles, and then going down to GatorWorld and getting to see gators firsthand and those kind of things. I've always been integrated into the environment and the ocean in that way.
I got the Knauss fellowship, moved to D.C., and I spent the year with NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program. So still doing things that I did in the Caribbean—working with corals—but on a different level. Now I was learning about how states and territories manage their corals. I was learning how we work together with the federal government to create communications around coral reefs, to create policy decisions and advocate for coral reefs. Also I got to learn very niche skill sets: I became a published oral historian when I was a Knauss fellow, and we were interviewing Native Hawaiians about [the] cultural importance of coral reefs. I had spent some time out in Hawaii for a summit, and so I had already made some local connections—they're all published on the NOAA Voices Archive. They're just so fun to learn about people's connection to coral reefs through culture and through history, versus, "Oh, I saw a coral reef today."
[Working as a NOAA program analyst] was so different from anything I had done before. It was all about building relationships with international partners— connecting our scientists with scientists abroad so that we can together, collectively, make ocean conservation progress or atmospheric progress. Share data. Build better models. I was learning about science that, you know—I worked with corals, work with seagrass, I worked with eDNA. I [had] never worked with the atmosphere side of it, which is a big part of NOAA. So I was learning all about space weather and hurricanes and all of these really amazing subjects that NOAA provides crucial data and information on. But a lot of that comes from our collaborations with international partners. And a lot of international partners rely on NOAA's data. So it's a vice-versa relationship. It's mutually beneficial to everybody.
My main role was that I led the U.N. Ocean Decade portfolio, or the U.N. Decade for Ocean Science [of] Sustainable Development. It's a very long title. That's why we call it the Ocean Decade. For a while I was just supporting on international relations. But towards the last five months of my job, I was leading the U.N. Ocean Decade portfolio, primarily focusing on how we can build out our U.S. governmental engagements in the Ocean Decade through partnerships, through initiatives and decade actions in that space. ... When I became a federal employee, I basically got ownership over a huge project that meant a lot to me. I got involved in policy through the U.N. Ocean Decade, and now I'm leading U.S. engagement in this. Then it was just taken away.
Could you talk about what an average day looked like for you on the job?
I work closely with a small group of people in the office ... briefing leadership, drafting documents, building relationships, so actually reaching out to foreign partners and establishing relationships, talking about, what can we do together to bridge whatever data gaps we're finding? A good example of that is France. NOAA and France, specifically Ifremer [a state-run oceanographic institution], have a huge and very long standing relationship together. That relationship covers variety of topics, including ocean observations or data management, different things like that. We work together at the international level ... to kind of facilitate how that relationship will look in the future.
The U.N. Ocean Decade side was a little different. Not only was I working with European partners, but this is a multilateral, large, global initiative. So I got to work with people from all over the world, including in the Global South. When I first joined, it was very much just outreach—let's go to conferences and let's do panels, and let's talk about the Ocean Decade. That's really fun, but it also just seems like a waste of resources. If we're going to go places and we're going to do things, we need to strategically build these relationships out, and we need to think, how is the Ocean Decade actually going to achieve its goals in 2030 if this is all we're doing? The goals are ambitious. The Ocean Decade wants you to have a clean ocean, a sustainable ocean—not necessarily goals that are going to happen overnight. So how can we strategically do outreach, encourage our scientists and our government officials to support initiatives that will bring the decade into the future?
A lot of my days were spent laboring over spreadsheets. I had put together a pretty comprehensive gap analysis where we were identifying where the U.S. can benefit relationship-wise in the decade, but also strategically, scientific-wise. If this country is working on this initiative, and we need access to that, or we need help on that, how can we together in the framework of the Ocean Decade, to achieve that goal? Everything I was doing was doing was at the benefit of the United States of America. And I think there's a loss with this administration['s belief] that international partnerships aren't important, [that] they don't really benefit us. But they're so important. And they do benefit us, because the ocean doesn't know boundaries. It's there, and we are all connected by it.
When I got the Ocean Decade portfolio, I thought it'd be a really great opportunity to use oral histories to talk to people working in the decade and have them share their experiences and their stories. One great thing about oral histories is, yes, they are living historical documents of people's stories through time and space. Their truth is ... what they felt in that moment, and that's how you capture that. But they're also really great for analyzing data, right? If I do two interviews in the Ocean Decade, and both of them say a gap in the Decade is diversity. That is a data point. Now, multiple people have said, this is a gap. Now how can we, as the Ocean Decade, address this gap in, you know, a meaningful way? So that's what the point of the interviews was. Before I got fired, I was only able to do five, unfortunately, but they would have spanned the globe. And given that the United States has kind of distanced itself from a lot of the U.N. work right now, I'm not sure if that project will ever be complete or published.
Were there any projects that you were working on, that you accomplished, [or] were looking forward to working on?
José is a 99-year-old World War II veteran that I had the opportunity of doing an oral history for. This was separate from my Ocean Decade project. So backstory: the Ocean Exploration office at NOAA had a vessel that found a submarine from World War II. They took a video of it and they posted it. They did a lot of media around it, and somewhere in Brazil, a 99-year-old World War II veteran's son, also José, said, "I'm pretty sure my grandfather or my father was on that vessel. "And he reached out to NOAA.
He's 99, like I said, so his son sat in on the interview and helped as well. It was crazy, because it was almost like interviewing two generations, one saying what happened, and the other one kind of reiterating how he felt: He told me this once, and here's an artifact from it, I'm so proud to be the son of this man, basically ... The reason I'm telling you the story is because it's probably never going to see the light of day. Before I left, I was working on a way to fund translation services for the project, because transcription-wise, usually I and the other oral historians will just listen and type. That's great when it's in English, but this was in Portuguese. We wanted to be able to make it accessible, not just to English speakers, but to Portuguese speakers as well, because that's the community that it's from. It highlighted the international relationship between Brazil and the United States during World War II and how that relationship has kind of continued through time.
None of the Ocean Decade oral histories were published either. I can't control what people say in those interviews, [and] every single one of them talks about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility. I don't want to publish their stories and then have somebody take them down without consent. Obviously, I can't control that. But when it comes to international partners, they don't necessarily know the extent of what's happening here, which is why stories like this are so important—so that people, not just in the United States but abroad, can see [that] what happens in the United States will eventually affect you, unfortunately. If we're going to chop down our trees and we're going to up our carbon emission, that is something that impacts the world, not just the United States.
Can you talk about your experience of being fired?
Starting [on] inauguration day, it became very clear that something was coming. My boss had told us a list of probationary workers was requested—trying not to raise alarms, trying to keep it calm. But I think we all knew what that meant. But what we didn't expect, at NOAA anyways, was to watch every other probationary worker in the federal force—NIH, DOI, etc.—get fired first, and then we just sat there. We were like, when is it coming? I explain it as being like, I'm a fish and somebody's caught me, and they just won't reel me in, right? They're just letting me suffer on the hook. Being in this unknown was traumatic. Then we finally get the email.
I filed [an appeal] on political bias. I was like, I'm being fired for political reasons, not because I'm not good at my job. It was illegal the way that we were fired—which is wild to me, because if they would have just taken us out in a Reduction in Force, that would have been completely legal. They fired us, and then the judge said you need to bring them back.
They reinstated us for about two pay periods. I was getting back pay, and I got checks. Then the restraining order ended and we got an email saying, you're re-fired. ... What they said is, we are not going to make you pay us back, even though you were fired on the 27th and we paid you after. We are going to let you keep that money out of a courtesy. They took out insurance from all of those paychecks. But our insurance ended when we were fired, right? So they paid us, took out insurance, but then told us that we are no longer insured past our original firing date. So they robbed us, basically. That's funny, because we got fired, and I thought it was over. And then we got the insurance email, and I was like, it's not over. They can't just let us go. They've got to find something else to torture us with.
I've been unemployed for almost ... two months now, and I've never received so many rejection letters in my life. I wake up in the morning, usually to a bad email, I spend my day applying for jobs—going to job fairs, attending webinars that are talking about how to transition from the government to different job sectors. But the job market right now is just trash when you've got thousands of fired feds all applying for the same jobs. And now that we're not getting paid, it's financially becoming challenging. I think I'm probably gonna end up moving back home with my parents at 30 years old. It's been very stressful and hard, and I just never thought—sorry—I just never thought I would have to go through something like this.
Then after getting fired, [some] people are just telling you, "Oh, it's for the best. They're making it more efficient." And like, [these] people are just blindly following, and that's disheartening to see.
People are saying that to you, that it's for the best?
I posted on Facebook, shared my story, and one of my family members shared it onto their personal account. I made it shareable so that people could share my story. And there were some incredibly negative comments from people. ... It's just disheartening to see, like, I lost my job, and then instantly people were, like, it's for the best.
I think a lot of people are, at this point, even trying to leave the country—trying to find different jobs, opportunities and and other continents, or, trying to save money, moving back with their families, if they're early-career. I've got a little bit more money to get me through the the summer, but it'll get there at some point. It's gonna start impacting our economy. It's gonna impact the data that you get. Hurricane season's coming up. People might not feel this for a little bit, but eventually these cuts to the budget, to the grants, to the personnel, they're going to impact people's daily lives—especially in coastal states, especially in states that are prone to natural disaster, which are a lot of red states.
What fears or concerns [do] you have about what will happen to the communities that you worked with? To the U.S.? To these international communities?
I think trust is a big thing. The way that this administration has been handling its international relations—and obviously our scientists abroad, they know it's not our fault. They know that the things that are happening are out of our control. When I got fired, several of my colleagues in Europe reached out to me, and they were like "Don't leave!" and I was like "I wish I wasn't! I want to keep working with you." I've enjoyed my time working with with these partners. I think that's the biggest thing, is there's going to be a lack of trust. We're not going to be able to commit to things. We're not going to be able to do things that we've in the past said we would do. And eventually people are just going to start looking for other options and other ways to get the data and the information they need, and building different partnerships that don't include us.
The work we do isn't for fun. The work NOAA does is for science, service, and stewardship. We want to make science that protects people. We want to make decisions that protect people. I think that's forgotten sometimes. As a Florida native, somebody from Florida who has been through hurricanes, they're not fun. They're not fun. In fact, I read a study recently that said the money we put in towards building better infrastructure or collecting better data to prevent hurricanes actually saves us more money than if a hurricane comes through and we have to rebuild everything. So financially, it doesn't make sense to just cut programs like this. I think a lot of Floridians would agree.
It's not just going to be me impacted. It's going to be my little sister who wants to get her master's degree, but maybe they won't have a master's degree for her anymore because the federal agency that funds that, or the grant system that funds that, is no more.
Is there anything about your work, your department, these cuts, that we haven't had a chance to talk about, that you'd want to touch on?
We need people to kind of step up and call their representatives and talk to their congresspeople. Whether it's just, "Hey, you know, my friend was impacted by this, and I would like to see you do something about it." Or maybe it's a bigger issue, "Climate change is important, and here's why." It's hard. Like I said, you have to know your audience, and you have to know who you're talking to. YYou might not want to use the words climate change when you're talking to your Republican representative. But there are ways to talk about climate change without using the words climate change. Hurricanes are a really great example of that in Florida.
I just think that there's so many things that we do that maybe people don't even realize that benefits their daily lives. The cuts that were leaked recently—budget cuts—were extreme. They would basically remove parts of NOAA completely, uprooting lives: people who are parents, who are early-career and just getting started, interns, students, seasoned professionals. It's going to impact so many different people. Hopefully that budget never sees the light of day, and we have a lot of time before that even gets voted on. But it's serious, and the fact that some of these things are even being talked about, to me, is ludicrous. If you can't see the value in this, then you just haven't experienced it. I think that's very privileged. It's sometimes hard for people to put themselves in other people's shoes, because we're all basically a little selfish. So I just ask people to try and do that. Have a little empathy. Show a little kindness.
If you have lost your job as a result of ongoing government cuts and are interested in speaking with me for this series, please contact me on Signal at simbler.88 or simbler@defector.com. I would love to hear from you.
