By Dr. Liz Renner
On Friday, Feb. 14th, I was laid off from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the sweeping DOGE cuts to probationary employees across the Department of the Interior.
Everything happened so abruptly I had to race to fire off emails, download and save important paperwork and files, and pack up my office all while my colleagues were coming in to offer hugs and support as they helped me load boxes into my truck. Tears were shed. Expletives were uttered.
I left the hatchery feeling betrayed and discarded after uprooting my life to relocate to Yankton for this opportunity, after working extra hard through excruciating pain while on bloodthinners and brain pressure drugs to prove myself capable in my first field season, after receiving overwhelmingly positive performance reviews in my first evaluation, completing continuing education training, and being selected for a national fisheries leadership academy set to start next week. It was a gut punch and I’m still reeling from it.
I’m finally ready to open up more about my situation after taking the long weekend to regroup by ice fishing and eating smoked meats with Drew and our friends. To say I’m devastated doesn’t even scratch the surface. I lost my dream job working on pallid sturgeon conservation on the Missouri River.
It wasn’t just a paycheck to me, it was a calling. I don’t expect billionaires who have never scraped by on a graduate stipend eating ramen from a campus food bank, or bounced around as an underpaid seasonal technician, or worked to collect data in grueling or dangerous weather conditions to understand that level of commitment to conservation, to understand the sacrifices thousands of us have made on behalf of the species and habitats we’re passionate about conserving. These sweeping cuts will do immediate and lasting harm to our nation’s public lands and waters, to our wildlife, and our natural resources.
I come from a long legacy of public service and grew up surrounded by U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps, and South Dakota Air National Guard (SDARNG) veterans and active duty airmen. My grandparents were U.S. postmasters, and my cousins work for various federal agencies across the U.S. My partner is a purple heart SDARNG veteran who cleared IEDs and landmines in Afghanistan. I pivoted away from academia and toward state and federal agencies because I wanted to do hands-on, applied science and conservation work and be a part of this family legacy of public service.
While I’m grateful for the outpouring of support from friends and all the leads on other jobs and postdocs, I’m going to take my time transitioning to the next chapter. As many have pointed out, I’m resilient as hell and will bounce back like I always have whenever life kicks me in the teeth. But I don’t want to only be known for my resilience — I am overdue for a gentler chapter. I’m tired of constantly uprooting, starting over, and re-establishing myself, even if I’m good at it.
As I watch the country that my loved ones and I swore an oath to defend from all enemies foreign and domestic edge closer and closer to the precipice of failed state territory, I’ve decided to take my time in determining what my next steps will look like, in part because I think these cuts to science and natural resources are just a small foretaste of the chaos to come.
As much as I’d like to look for postdocs or jobs in other parts of the U.S. or abroad, I’m reluctant to leave my family and friends behind in South Dakota. I’ve grown to love the Yankton community and I’m upset to have to leave my new friends, neighbors, and colleagues here who supported me while I was overcoming my health issues and recovering from brain surgery.
Unfortunately, I cannot afford to keep my lease and will be moving back home to live with my grandma Gail and help out around the farm. I plan to substitute teach and bartend, write more poems as part of my first collection (“Bigmouth Buffalo for the Broken Heart”), garden, quilt, and pick up other odd jobs as needed, because I haven’t had a sabbatical or gap period since graduating from college in 2017. I started grad school research at Kansas State three days after I completed my undergrad, and I went straight from Kansas State to South Dakota Game, Fish, and Parks. I moved from Fort Pierre to Yankton over the course of a weekend and started that next Monday — you get the picture. As a working class early career biologist I simply have not had the luxury to pause. Now it’s been forced upon me.
I know I am not alone and I take solace in the fact that I was one of thousands of dedicated civil servants who did nothing wrong and now find their lives upended. Now that I’m a free agent, I’m no longer beholden to institutional expectations of silence out of fear for my job. Fascism is here and our institutions are being dismantled too fast to keep up, as if we’re drinking from a fire hose — this overwhelm is by design.
If you haven’t been affected personally yet, fear not. It won’t be long before they’ll come for you and yours, too.
With love and rage, Dr. Liz Renner — newly unemployed and unmuzzled.
This was originally posted by Dr. Liz Renner on Feb. 17, 2025.