A week into February, Kaesee Bourne was nervous about her job. Last August, she had joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a fish and wildlife biologist working in California and Nevada. "What should have been a stable job had started to become very unstable," she said. After Donald Trump took office, Bourne and her colleagues begun receiving a barrage of concerning emails, memorandums, and instructions—not from their supervisors, or even people who were a part of the Fish and Wildlife leadership, but from representatives of the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This obscure federal agency has been tasked with the campaign of mass firings of federal workers led by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
When Bourne saw an OPM email asking for a list of probationary employees at Fish and Wildlife—a status that refers to recently hired employees, or employees recently moved into a new position—she asked her supervisor about it. But Bourne's supervisor had no additional insight; they had both received the email at the same time. "I've been hearing that the goal of the new administration was to make people feel stressed out and just make them feel the chaos," Bourne said. "It definitely worked."
Bourne took Valentine's Day off, and was in her car when she got the phone call. It was her supervisor, letting her know that she would be fired in a few hours. Later that morning, Bourne and all the probationary employees joined a virtual meeting where they were assured by the department that they were not being let go because of their performance, despite that being the officially stated reason for their terminations. "They had expressed that we were all stellar employees, that we got our work done, that they were proud of us, and that this was not something that they chose to do," Bourne said.
When Bourne got the official email stating that she had been fired, she couldn't bring herself to read it. Two hours later, she was locked out of her computer.
Bourne is one of thousands of probationary federal workers terminated by DOGE, an agency ransacking the federal government under the premise that it is "inefficient." But Bourne's work to protect endangered species in Nevada and California, including the Mojave Desert tortoise, the California tiger salamander, and a small migratory bird called the least Bell's vireo, was not actually funded by the federal government; although she was a federal worker, her position at Fish and Wildlife was funded by the California Department of Transportation. After I learned about Bourne's firing from her Instagram post, I spoke with her about the work she did at Fish and Wildlife, the emotional whiplash of her termination, and her fears for the future of the department.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Could you tell me a little bit about your path towards becoming a scientist and how you ended up working for the federal government?
I grew up in the Las Vegas area. So I'm native to the Mojave Desert, native to this area. When I was younger, I would watch those nature documentaries, and around middle school, I decided that I wanted to work with animals in some capacity. I was like, maybe marine biology. And then that was pretty much my goal all throughout high school.
Obviously I was young, so I did not realize how much college was. And I had gotten into some really good schools that would allow me to actually study marine biology. But I decided to make the smart decision and stay local and go to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which is the university that we have out here. And obviously, being in Vegas, there's no ocean, so there was no marine biology for me to study. So I pivoted to ecology and evolution, which honestly I grew to love. It opened my eyes to see that there's honestly some really interesting things to look into even if you're not in the ocean.
I didn't really know exactly what job I wanted to do or what company I wanted to work for. I of course had a spreadsheet with, like, National Geographic, Discovery, all of that. Fish and Wildlife was on the list, but I just didn't have a whole lot of experience with them. I was applying for a bunch of different jobs on LinkedIn. It was honestly an awful time, because people talk about it a lot nowadays, you get ghosted by jobs. You apply to a bunch of them, and then you don't get called for an interview, or you do and then you still get ghosted. So it was just exhausting. I had finally gotten a call back for the internship I did, and it ended up being with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I got to go to Leavenworth, Washington, and work at a fish hatchery there. I was a digital media specialist working with their visitor center, just helping people to enjoy their time at the hatchery, interpret and give them information on the fish there and all different types of topics. It was a lot of fun getting to do that outreach. And because of this internship, I was given a pathway to be hired on permanently with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
I had seen this position that allowed me to work from any any office in Las Vegas, or in Nevada or California. So I was like, "Oh, that sounds perfect. Let me go ahead and apply for that." And obviously I applied, did good inside the interview, and I got the position. I was very grateful to have the opportunity to just be able to get into this space that's so hard to get into. I wrote about it inside of one of my posts, but it was like a seven-month hiring process.
People fight tooth and nail to be able to get into these positions, and we deal with it because they're supposed to be stable jobs. And even though they don't pay as much as many jobs in the private sector do, we still want to be in the federal government because of the stability, because we love the mission of these companies. The mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with others to conserve, protect and enhance fish wildlife, plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.
Could you talk a little about what an average day looked like for you?
My job was computer work, because I was working with that whole side of the Endangered Species Act and consultations. I was working on these tools that we allow our clients and other federal agencies to use to make their consultations easier. The clients usually end up doing the surveys for their project. They go and check and see if the animals are in that area. They're the ones who have to do a lot of that field work for these projects. And then they put all of their research and findings together in a biological assessment, and that's what they send to us. And then we take that and we're like, "OK, you're going to be doing road work in this area. It seems like these three species are endangered, and they could possibly be in this area. Let's come up with some ways that you can still do your project without making all of these animals go extinct."
We work a lot with the Department of Transportation, and that ends up being with state agencies sometimes. And the state agencies could be Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, or NDOT, which is the Nevada Department of Transportation. Maybe they're building a road. Maybe they're helping with some fiber-optic things. Whatever their their projects are, we just are saying, "OK, you're doing this project. These animals are over here. Let's help you do this project in the safest way possible for these species."
How have you been processing [your termination] in the weeks since?
I didn't think I was going to have to go back into the job search. I thought I was done with that. I hadn't been updating my resume, I hadn't been looking at new jobs. Like, I was in the place that I thought I would be until I retired.
This week has been a little bit better, because I feel like I've had more time to think about it, had more time to mourn the position being gone. I've been able to talk with other people who have also been let go, just seeing how they're handling it. I've started to apply for unemployment. I've done some other interviews. Every day is definitely different, but there's a mix of emotions, there's sadness, there's confusion, there's anger, light excitement about the future, because now we're gonna have to figure out something new. Just, yeah. I'm feeling everything.
I was also curious at what point in your termination experience you decided that you wanted to speak out?
At first, I was a little hesitant to start speaking. I had made that post on my Instagram account, but before I did it, I was like, "Oh, man, should I really be posting about this?" When you're a federal employee, you're bound by the Hatch Act, which just aims to keep that space non-partisan. It just wants to make sure that we're not participating in political activities. So it's kind of like an area that people just try to stay away from altogether because we don't want to jeopardize our position. I was so used to not talking about the administration, not talking about my feelings towards anything remotely political. So once that happened, I was still in that mindset. And then I was like, "Wait a minute. I can." I can talk about more stuff now, and also I'm just talking about the facts of what happened to me. So that gave me the freedom to share what was going on. I also realized that a lot of people don't know what's happening at all, or they don't know how it affects them. They don't know how it affected us, and we're not going to see the change that we want to see if no one knows what's going on. So that's the kind of mindset that started to change how I felt about speaking out.
Do you have any sense of what things are going to be like in your department at Fish and Wildlife Service now? What will happen to the projects you were working on? Obviously there's still the same amount of work but fewer people.
I of course don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I do know that a lot of these people were working on very important projects, and now someone else has to come in and start from the bottom and see what they were working on, figure out who they were talking to, what meetings they were having, what step of the project they're in, and then continue with the project to bring it to completion. But not only are they having to take on this entire new project, they're also having to deal with the projects they were already working on. It's causing us to break some of the contracts and promises we made to other agencies and companies. Like my position was under a reimbursable agreement with Caltrans. So Caltrans actually were the ones who funded my role, and I was supposed to be there to take on most of their projects. So now that agreement has been broken because there's no longer a dedicated biologist in my role to help with their projects.
There are teams where their supervisor was a probationary employee, only because they had just switched agencies, but they could have been working for the government for 20-plus years, but because they switched agencies, or there was some clerical error, they were also let go. So now there's teams without supervisors, so they'll have to figure out who's going to fill that role. There's the hiring freeze, so who knows when they're going to be able to fill our positions? It just yeah, there's just so much. There's a lot that we're going to have to pick up, and there's still a threat that they could possibly be let go as well. So people are afraid for that.
I just feel like the emails that are being sent are not being sent with a lot of care. And it almost feels like we're all inside of this game, and we're just being messed with. And it's like, this is not normal, but it just keeps on happening.
Is there anything else you want to share with readers?
It's important for us to share how these firings and what's going on with the federal employees, I think we all need to know how it's going to affect us. Because a lot of times, people don't really care about what's going on unless it directly affects them.
I just feel like people need to take the time to just realize how many services that they use are because of the federal government or federal funding. And if these things get changed, or if the people get fired, it's going to affect them. The water we drink, the air that we breathe, the animals that we love to take pictures of, the lands that we like to go and hang out with our family on—it's all affected by all of us.
The people who work in these spaces, we're not politicians. We're just people who love the environment and love the animals enough to help take care of them. And because of what's been going on and how this new administration has been running things, we're not even able to fully focus on our jobs, because we're worried about our livelihood. We're worried about having enough money to take care of these animals. We signed up to be civil servants, and we signed up to serve the American people. We signed up to be helpers. And it just really sucks that this has been happening.
