These workers helped Wisconsin farmers navigate changing weather. DOGE fired them.

Laurie Nowatzke says she is grieving her life as a civil servant after being terminated from her position at the Midwest Climate Hub as part of the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the federal workforce, led by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

“My entire life has been about public service, even before I could have a job,” Nowatzke told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today,” pointing to her father’s 30-year career in the U.S. Air Force and two grandfathers who spent their careers in the Navy. 

“It has always meant a lot to me to do work that supports public missions,” she said.

The Midwest Climate Hub was established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, in 2014 to provide scientific research and practical support to farmers in the region. Based in Ames, Iowa, the organization oversees eight states, including Wisconsin.

“We work so hard to deliver climate and weather information to farmers and producers around the Midwest in the face of some really extreme and unpredictable weather patterns,” Nowatzke said.

After serving for four years in a coordinator role, Nowatzke was promoted to the position of associate director of the Midwest Climate Hub in January. On the night of Feb. 13, Nowatzke received a termination letter by email from the USDA’s human resources department, leaving her with only one day to fill out offboarding paperwork and finish her employment with the USDA.

Nowatzke believes her new position with the agency is what marked her as a probationary employee and triggered the termination notice. In a similar pattern reported by other terminated federal workers, Nowatzke said that the letter cited performance issues as the reason for her termination despite years of excellent performance reviews and merit awards within the agency. 

Because of this, she has filed an appeal with the Merit Systems Protection Board and is hoping for a resolution. Earlier this week, six federal workers got their jobs back through the same appeals process.

Nowatzke said she feels lucky that her spouse has a job to bring in income while she looks for work, which is not the case for all terminated federal workers. 

And she worries about the long-term ripple effects of mass cuts to agencies like the USDA that support early-career scientists like Josh Bendorf and Tracy Campbell, two recruits she brought to the Midwest Climate Hub from Wisconsin.

“There’s a lot of work being done by public servants that really can’t be filled by the private sector,” Nowatzke said.

A meteorologist for Wisconsin farmers

Josh Bendorf grew up on a dairy farm near Platteville in southwest Wisconsin. He went on to study atmospheric sciences and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which got him interested in looking at the connections between weather and agriculture — a skill set he brought with him when he started working at the Midwest Climate Hub as a research fellow in 2023.

Bendorf told “Wisconsin Today” that the kind of meteorology work he does with the agriculture industry is not generally well understood. 

“A lot of folks know their TV weatherman, or they get their forecast from the National Weather Service,” Bendorf said. “They maybe don’t realize how wide-reaching climate services can be. We’re bringing together both meteorological and agronomic expertise.”

Bendorf came to the Midwest Climate Hub with a master’s degree in agriculture and meteorology from the University of Iowa and with experience working with a Wisconsin chapter of Pheasants Forever, a nonprofit organization that focuses on wildlife habitat conservation. When a research fellow position opened up at the Midwest Climate Hub, he jumped at the opportunity.

During Bendorf’s time with the agency, he launched the Wisconsin Ag Climate Outlook, a weekly newsletter with statewide data and forecasting on things like temperature, precipitation, soil moisture and wildfire risk to help farmers make informed decisions about managing their herds and crops.

After nearly two years as a research fellow, Bendorf was promoted to a full-time position as an ag climatologist in January of this year. Then on Feb. 13, he and his colleagues were called into an emergency meeting to announce that all probationary employees would be receiving termination notices.

“I knew that was me because I had just started my fully federal position on Jan. 27, so I had not met my one year yet,” Bendorf said. 

That weekend, Bendorf received an official termination letter stating that due to his performance, it would no longer be in the public interest for him to remain with the agency.

“This was rather interesting because I’d only been on for three weeks, and I had not had a performance review yet,” he said, noting that his supervisors at USDA had always indicated that he was “doing a fantastic job.”

Bendorf said it was a “badge of honor” to work in the public sector and provide “usable information to farmers in Wisconsin and the broader Midwest.”

“To me, that was a really beautiful thing — the information was freely available to the public for them to use,” he said.

Now, Bendorf is navigating the job market. In the future, he hopes to get back into the ag climate world, but for now his first priority is to find work to support himself financially. He hopes that Wisconsin communities will rally around federal workers who have lost their jobs.

“It’s important for people to know that these are their friends and neighbors who are being affected by this,” he said.

From stability to quicksand in a government job

Tracy Campbell has envisioned a career as a civil servant ever since starting a graduate program in agroecology at UW-Madison in 2016.

From the beginning, Campbell’s graduate work was hands-on and focused on Wisconsin. She researched water quality in the Yahara watershed and partnered with farmers in the Central Sands region to better understand nitrate in irrigation water.

“I fell in love with the research I was doing,” she said.

Campbell said that she had kept her eye on the Midwest Climate Hub for a while, so when a position opened up last year, she jumped at the opportunity. She was brought on as a research fellow focused on agroforestry, or the integration of trees and shrubs on farmland.

“My research really focused on how we can use trees, use agroforestry to help farmers better prepare for the extreme weather events and unpredictable rainfall we’re seeing as a result of climate change,” she said.

Before the federal workforce cuts, Campbell had just started drafting up a report related to grazing management that had been directly requested by someone in the farming industry.

“Unfortunately, I am no longer working on that,” she told “Wisconsin Today.”

As a probationary employee with less than a year of service, Campbell received a termination notice on Feb. 14.

“It’s been pretty chaotic ever since,” she said, both for terminated employees who haven’t received clear guidance on next steps and for the “skeleton crews” left behind to manage major projects without full staffing. For example, it’s unclear if the Wisconsin Ag Climate Outlook will continue.

For Campbell, the federal job cuts represent a huge loss not only for the workers and their research but for the general public. 

“People [in the civil service] choose to be paid less money for the stability, for the health benefits, for a mission they can support, and it seems like a lot of that is on the line right now,” she said. “I think that should concern everyone. When your federal government isn’t able to provide stability, what does that say?”