Days after federal job cuts began to hit Alaska, the full extent of the layoffs was not yet known, even as those who lost their jobs began to contend with impacts on them and their communities.

At the end of last week, dozens of Alaska federal employees across multiple agencies lost their jobs as part of mass layoffs ordered by President Donald Trump. While the exact numbers remained unclear, “dozens of Alaskans — potentially over 100 in total” were fired, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Friday, including workers at the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Just how much further the cuts will go isn’t clear.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration began laying off Federal Aviation Administration employees nationwide. The agency has a large presence in Alaska, but it wasn’t known as of Monday how many people were included in the cuts.

Unions representing air traffic controllers and other federal aviation safety workers here said they were monitoring the layoffs but didn’t have specific information about positions lost as of Monday. Alaska has about 80 probationary status employees within the FAA, said Elizabeth Doherty of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a union representing aviation workers.

Last week’s layoff notices targeted probationary workers, but some Alaskans fired said they’d worked for the federal government for much longer than a year or two and were on probationary status only because of a promotion or role shift. Employees told the Daily News the firing paperwork cited performance issues — even when they’d received outstanding evaluations.

[Earlier coverage: ‘An outsized impact’: Federal layoffs begin in Alaska on Trump orders]

In Alaska, some of the cuts hit federal employees who reside in small communities adjacent to the state’s vast federally managed public lands. Those fired included biologists, field technicians, logistics specialists, a superintendent, an archeologist and a pilot, just within the National Park Service, according to multiple park service employees. On Monday, some said they would challenge the layoffs. But if they were unsuccessful in regaining their positions, they said the detrimental impacts on the state’s visitors and residents would be extensive.

[Alaskans gather by the hundreds to protest DOGE and other Trump administration efforts]

The mass layoffs announced last week included the National Park Service in Alaska, where at least 30 people lost their jobs, according to a parks advocacy group. Five of those people worked at Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, in Southwest Alaska. Several said they were hired under a local hire program that allows parks to hire Alaskans with special knowledge and skills more directly.

While the layoffs targeted probationary employees hired a year or two ago, some of those fired at Lake Clark had been working for the park service for much longer.

Warren Hill was one of them. Hill said he worked at Alaska national parks, including Katmai and Lake Clark, for more than 20 years, in a variety of roles, garnering multiple performance awards. Other employees call him a crucial keeper of institutional knowledge for the park.

His connection to the area is deep: Hill’s family is Dena’ina Athabascan from the Port Alsworth area, and he and his wife live on family land near the park headquarters. Before Lake Clark, he worked at Katmai National Park — always with the goal, he said in an interview Monday, of getting back to “the origins of my family” in Lake Clark.

Hill worked many jobs over his years at the national park, which has a small staff in Port Alsworth and some administration in Anchorage. About a year ago, Hill was promoted to the role of maintenance worker supervisor, which put him back on probationary status because of the change of title.

Hill was recovering from surgery and on sick leave when he was fired, he said. His park superintendent called to tell him the news, he said.

“The email states the termination is effective immediately and to turn in my credentials and vacate the premises. It also states that my termination is based on the fact that I do not meet the performance standards and do not have the knowledge, skills and abilities to work at that pay grade.”

By the next day he’d been locked out of his work email.

“Twenty-one years of service to our nation and nearing retirement, gone on a technicality with no option to appeal,” he wrote in a public Facebook post. “I am not alone in our park. Four others received the exact same termination letter, seemingly chosen at random, and I am sure there will be more coming.”

Hill said he’d take legal action if he knew where to start, and would gladly return to the job if he could. Jobs are hard to come by in rural Alaska, especially those with solid pay and benefits. He’s said he was concerned about how the remaining staff will safely operate Lake Clark next summer.

“Visitors come to the park expecting services,” he said. “There won’t be any.”

‘Quite a blow’

Kayleigh McCarthy was one of at least 30 U.S. Forest Service employees in Alaska told on Thursday that they had been laid off.

“It was quite a blow,” she said. And she wasn’t alone.

McCarthy said she knows of six other Forest Service employees who lost their jobs in Wrangell alone, a community of roughly 2,000 people in Southeast Alaska.

“These are people who are not going to be — not just spending their money — but spending their time, spending their resources, helping their community,” she said. “That’s a pretty big loss for any community.”

After she was told Thursday that she was on a list of employees who would be let go, McCarthy received an official termination letter on Sunday stating that “the agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest.” But she said that in her recent performance review, she scored “fully successful” on every metric.

McCarthy said she plans to appeal her dismissal and is considering “other courses of action.”

Her departure reduces the permanent staff of the Anan Wildlife Observatory from three to two full-time employees.

“It’s definitely going to put a lot more work on both of them,” said McCarthy, about the staff of the bear-viewing site an hour-long boat ride away from Wrangell, in the Tongass National Forest.

The reduction comes as interest in bear viewing in the region is on the rise. Loss of experienced staffers will impact visitors’ experiences, McCarthy said, as having several seasons under their belts allowed her and her colleagues to be more familiar with the bears and their behavior.

McCarthy had begun working as a biological technician at the Anan Wildlife Observatory in 2022 — first as a temporary employee and then starting in 2023 as a permanent employee staffing the site in the summer and getting a master’s degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks during the winter. She was still on a two-year probationary period when the Trump administration ordered layoffs to begin.

McCarthy, who grew up in Michigan, had never planned to move to Alaska when she graduated from college in 2020. But she came across an opportunity in the Tongass National Forest in 2021, and after several seasons there, she and her boyfriend — a lifelong Wrangell resident — had been planning to build their home there.

“That’s where we wanted to spend our time and invest our money and our empathy and our hearts and mind, into the community. But now we’re having to look somewhere else.”

Her research at UAF focused on a management plan for the Anan Wildlife Observatory. Her work at the observatory included trail and site maintenance, and ensuring that visitors remained safe around bears, which regularly come within feet of people at the site during the summer months.

“I really fell in love with the location. I fell in love with the bears. I fell in love with the town,” said McCarthy.

Now, her plan to build a life in Alaska is in jeopardy. Without a job in wildlife biology, she said, she and her boyfriend are unlikely to stay in Wrangell, or even in the state.

“With there being limited wildlife jobs in Southeast, if I don’t get one of those, I think we would be looking at leaving the state, which is not something either of us want to do,” she said.

Losing institutional knowledge

Eileen Kramer and her husband have worked for the park service in Alaska for around a decade, and as full-time employees based in Lake Clark since 2020. Both were fired on Friday, with the same letter that said they weren’t meeting performance standards.

The email came from a person she’d never heard of or dealt with in Alaska, she said. Both Kramer and her husband had outstanding performance evaluations, she said.

The two are still absorbing the news. They live in employee housing in Port Alsworth, so they’re trying to determine when they’ll need to leave — and where they will go.

Kramer said she’s worried about how the park will operate in search and rescue situations, and what visitors will find when they arrive in remote Alaska.

“We’re losing this huge amount of institutional knowledge,” Kramer said.

Caitlin Shortell, an Anchorage employment law attorney, said she’d been hearing from fired Alaska federal workers, some of whom were also let go under claims of performance issues.

“One employee has never had a poor evaluation but along with a group of her coworkers in the National Park Service, received a form letter notifying her of her termination for poor performance,” Shortell said.

Probationary workers should be able to file an appeal of their termination to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent quasi-judicial agency meant to protect government workers from political reprisals.

Fired workers should learn about their rights to appeal so they don’t waive them, she said.

Hundreds of Alaskans gathered Monday in Anchorage, Juneau, Fairbanks and elsewhere to protest the layoffs.

Alaska’s U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is expected to address the impacts of federal layoffs, among other topics, during a town hall meeting on Wednesday, after she said Friday that the abrupt firings were bringing “confusion, anxiety, and now trauma to our civil servants.”

Alaska U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan and U.S. Rep. Nick Begich have not commented publicly about the impacts of layoffs in Alaska. Neither responded to questions on Monday.

At a town hall hosted by Begich in Fairbanks on Monday, several people gathered to share their concerns about the layoffs. McCarthy was among them.

“He asked me and others who were impacted to put together information about our positions and being let go,” she said, adding that Begich said “he would review them on a case-by-case basis.”

“He was also asked if he thinks these cuts are wrong and he said he wouldn’t say that as a blanket statement,” she added.

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Do you have additional information about actions involving the federal workforce in Alaska? Use the form below or reach out to reporters Iris Samuels, Michelle Theriaut Boots or Sean Maguire via email at isamuels@adn.com, mtheriault@adn.com or smaguire@adn.com or via encrypted message on Signal at irissamuels.11, michelletheriaultboots.53 and SeanBMaguire.11. Reach editor David Hulen at dhulen@adn.com or via Signal at davidhulen.99.

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