March 4, 2025 — The head of squid research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Narragansett Bay facility is among the hundreds of agency employees nationwide who are no longer on the job, according to one of NOAA’s former administrators.
Former National Marine Fisheries Service Administrator Janet Coit said Monday that about 20 employees from NOAA’s Rhode Island office and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts were recently dismissed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Coit shared the revelation during a roundtable discussion hosted by U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) at Save the Bay’s headquarters near the Port of Providence.
Coit, who directed the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) from 2011 to 2021, called the firings “sudden, irrational and indiscriminate.”
“The circumstances are dire,” she said. “The impact will be felt in a cascading and ripple effect across many different coastal communities.”
NOAA began firing employees on Feb. 27 as part of the latest wave of cuts from DOGE to shrink the federal workforce. NOAA employs some 12,000 people nationally — 94 of whom work in Rhode Island, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.