budget cuts

“It’s making our work unsafe, and it’s unsanitary for any workplace,” but especially an active laboratory full of fire-reactive chemicals and bacteria, one Montlake researcher said.

Press officers at NOAA, the Commerce Department, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Montlake employees were informed last week that a contract for safety services — which includes the staff who move laboratory waste off-campus to designated disposal sites — would lapse after April 9, leaving just one person responsible for this task. Hazardous waste “pickups from labs may be delayed,” employees were warned in a recent email.

The building maintenance team’s contract expired Wednesday, which decimated the staff that had handled plumbing, HVAC, and the elevators. Other contacts lapsed in late March, leaving the Seattle lab with zero janitorial staff and a skeleton crew of IT specialists.

During a big staff meeting at Montlake on Wednesday, lab leaders said they had no updates on when the contracts might be renewed, one researcher said. They also acknowledged it was unfair that everyone would need to pitch in on janitorial duties on top of their actual jobs.

Nick Tolimieri, a union representative for Montlake employees, said the problem is “all part of the large-scale bullying program” to push out federal workers. It seems like every Friday “we get some kind of message that makes you unable to sleep for the entire weekend,” he said. Now, with these lapsed contracts, it’s getting “more and more petty.”

The problems, large and small, at Montlake provide a case study of the chaos that’s engulfed federal workers across many agencies as the Trump administration has fired staff, dumped contracts, and eliminated long-time operational support. Yesterday, hundreds of NOAA workers who had been fired in February, then briefly reinstated, were fired again.