More than a thousand people demonstrated Monday outside the Boulder offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in protest of President Donald Trump’s mass layoffs at the federal weather agency.

Around 800 NOAA workers nationwide, most of them “probationary” employees who had recently been hired or promoted, were terminated last week, part of a wave of mass firings across the executive branch carried out by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative spearheaded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a Trump megadonor. Thousands more could be at risk from an impending “reduction in force” initiative that aims drastically downsize the federal government.

Image

Addressing the crowd gathered just outside the NOAA research center that bears his name, former Democratic U.S. Representative David Skaggs, who represented Boulder in Congress for 12 years before his retirement in 1999, hailed the show of solidarity with “public servants all around the country.”

“We feel the loss here at NOAA because it affects us personally, our friends and our neighbors,” Skaggs said. “Of course, we know this is just the Boulder example of the mindless culling of civil servants whose work is little understood by Musk or the president.”

NOAA employs more than 10,000 people across dozens of sub-agencies and offices, including the National Weather Service and its network of 120 local weather forecasting stations nationwide. The agency’s Boulder facility, housed in the David Skaggs Research Center, includes the offices of NWS Boulder, the national headquarters of the agency’s Space Weather Prediction Center and laboratories used by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a partnership between NOAA and the the University of Colorado.

Ernie Hildner, a solar physicist who led the Space Weather Prediction Center for nearly 20 years before his 2005 retirement, said he was outraged by the Trump administration’s “sudden, sledgehammer firing of a whole class of employees regardless of their contributions or quality of performance.” Even among current and former NOAA employees, he said, information about the extent of the layoffs has been hard to come by.

“Government spokespersons have said the firings will not affect NOAA’s functions. I’m here to tell you that can’t be true,” Hildner told the crowd. “When 10 percent of the staff are dismissed abruptly — mostly younger, newly trained folks suddenly laid off, and mostly older, very experienced folks pushed into unexpected retirement — (that) will certainly reduce NOAA’s effectiveness. And that’s got to be true across the other federal agencies with similar layoffs.”

Image

Efforts to slash federal spending by DOGE and the executive branch’s Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first weeks in office — including attempted shutdowns of congressionally established agencies and a freeze on certain federal funds that has persisted in defiance of court orders — run contrary to long-settled separation-of-powers principles in the U.S. Constitution.

After the NOAA layoffs were announced last week, U.S. Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper and House Assistant Minority Leader Joe Neguse of Lafayette wrote to officials in the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the agency, raising concerns about Trump and Musk’s “ongoing efforts” to dismantle it.

“The work our scientists and civil servants do at NOAA is essential to U.S. national security, as well as the personal safety and daily lives of Americans,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter. “Dismantling NOAA or compromising its capabilities would put Americans across the country at great risk.”

Skaggs read a message to the crowd from Neguse, who he said was traveling back to Washington. Former Democratic U.S. Senator Tim Wirth, who represented Colorado in the Senate for one term ending in 1993, also briefly addressed the demonstrators.

A third former member of Congress in attendance was former Republican Representative Claudine Schneider, who served five terms representing Rhode Island’s 2nd District in the 1980s. Schneider, now a Colorado resident, was one of six current or former Republicans who sued in 2023 to block Trump from the presidential ballot under a Civil War-era insurrection clause in the Constitution, an effort ultimately rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Schneider told Newsline she was “nearly brought to tears” by the size and diversity of the crowd that showed up to Monday’s protest.

“It makes me hopeful that Coloradans and this nation will stand up,” she said. “The people cannot be ignored. That’s why it’s essential that we stand up, speak up and be heard, and that includes Republicans.”