Local NewsFebruary 22, 2025

Former USDA employees speak out after be laid off

Anthony Kuipers Moscow-Pullman Daily News
Ian Woodruff
Ian Woodruff
Andrea Skiles
Andrea Skiles
story image illustation

MOSCOW — Two Moscow residents who were fired from their federal jobs say that cutbacks will have a negative effect on ranchers, farmers and landowners across the region.

Ian Woodruff and Andrea Skiles were probationary employees with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Moscow until they were laid off earlier this month.

They were among the thousands of federal employees who were fired because of orders from President Donald Trump’s administration. Woodruff and Skiles were probationary employees who had been with the USDA for less than a year.

The termination email that Woodruff received from the USDA on Feb. 13 stated: “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.”

It did not provide more specific reasons for the firing.

While Skiles said poor performance is a legitimate reason for a probationary employee to be fired, neither she nor Woodruff received any indication that their performance was inadequate.

Woodruff said he received a great performance review from his supervisor and Skiles said she had not been at the agency long enough to have an official performance review.

Woodruff said their direct supervisor did not know the layoffs were coming. To their knowledge, no USDA employees at the local or state level had any input on who should be fired. Woodruff said his coworkers were as surprised as he was.

“The office was just in shock and there were people crying,” Woodruff said.

In a response to Daily News questions, the USDA emailed a statement:

“Secretary (Brooke) Rollins fully supports President Trump’s directive to optimize government operations, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s ability to better serve American farmers, ranchers, and the agriculture community,” the statement said. “We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar is being spent as effectively as possible to serve the people, not the bureaucracy.”

However, Woodruff and Skiles said firing USDA employees will only hurt farmers, ranchers and the agricultural community.

“I worry that having an understaffed NRCS office is going to result in worse service and less service for farmers and ranchers in the area,” he said. “And it’s going to contribute to the mentality that the government is slow and ineffective.”

Woodruff was a conservation planner and Skiles was a natural resources biologist. Their duties include working closely with farmers, ranchers and timberland owners to fund and carry out conservation projects on their land. They said their work mutually benefited both the ecosystem and the landowner’s business.

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They would meet with the landowners in person, walk their land, and come up with solutions for the landowner’s concerns. For example, the USDA would help fund forest thinning projects to increase wildfire resilience, Woodruff said.

Woodruff and Skiles worked with clients in multiple counties.

“Almost all the dryland wheat farmers around here have had contracts with NRCS,” Woodruff said.

Woodruff said Thursday there are two other probationary employees in the NRCS office who are worried about their job status. If more layoffs happen, a short-handed NRCS office will be overburdened by the extra work, he said.

“It’s like, truly, the exact opposite of the stated view of draining the swamp and getting rid of the deep state,” Woodruff said. “They did the opposite and it’s going to have negative impacts on the community.”

The two former USDA employees are facing a burden themselves. Both moved to Moscow from out of state specifically because they wanted to work for the NRCS office.

“It was something that I had to rearrange my life around,” said Skiles, who hails from Kansas City.

Skiles spent most of her life working for the federal government, having served for AmeriCorps and in the Army. Skiles said she fell in love with Moscow and the Palouse. She hoped to work the rest of her career in the federal government because she wanted to give back to the community “and do something bigger than myself.”

Skiles and Woodruff both said their lives have been turned upside down.

“I had an understanding of where I was going, and that’s just been fundamentally changed,” Woodruff said.

They can appeal their firing to the Merit Systems Protection Board. However, the MSPB is also facing uncertainty as President Donald Trump attempted to fire MSPB Chairperson Cathy Harris. Trump’s order has been temporarily halted by a federal judge.

Skiles and Woodruff are considering joining a class-wide complaint from the Alden Law Group. According to a Thursday NPR report, the law group has asked the Office of Special Counsel to intervene in the mass firings of probationary employees.

Skiles said probationary employees are supposed to have certain protections against firings, especially veterans like her. She said probationary employees cannot be fired at will from the executive branch.

“The most generous thing you could say about it is, it grossly disregarded policy,” she said.

Kuipers can be reached at akuipers@dnews.com.

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