What Trump is destroying:

Scientists behind some of the most important breakthroughs in Northwest scientific research over the past two decades have left their jobs in the wake of budget cutting by the Trump administration.

The federal government has terminated science experiments, canceled research contracts, set spending limits for travel and purchases to $1 and created uncertainty at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, a flagship of scientific research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I pass that flagship quite often on the bus. It’s near the Arboretum and the University, and right next to a Yacht Club. NOAA itself is a few miles northeast, on Lake Washington.

The science center has lost about 30 people, according to Nick Tolimieri, president of the fisheries chapter of the IFPTE Local 8A (a union leader for about 200 center employees in the bargaining unit). While science still continues at the center, many of those lost were scientists with significant experience.

The Trump administration had offered buyouts to agency staff to encourage early retirements as it seeks to cut the federal workforce.

To cut just for the sake of cutting, without taking into account the value of what they were throwing out.

Options to take early retirement, finalized last week, represent the loss of thousands of hours of research expertise honed in the Northwest’s rivers and urban streams, and probing the lives of the most revered wildlife species, including salmon and southern resident orcas.

The Times interviewed five of these scientists.

• Sarah Morley built a deep understanding of the food web and hydrology of urban streams and Northwest rivers.
• Mike Ford revealed just how inbred the southern resident killer whales are, a never-before understood element in their struggle to survive.
• Lynne Barre helped lead the world’s first successful rescue of a stranded baby killer whale, even returning the animal to her pod, where she has since gone on to bear two calves.
• George Pess has been a leader in fisheries science and management since 1989 and the “papa bear” — as he is lovingly referred to — of the interdisciplinary team of scientists gathering data on the Elwha River before dam removal, then the world’s largest, to be able to understand the impacts of a historic intervention for fisheries recovery.
• Nat Scholz helped crack the code on which chemical in tire dust is killing coho in urban streams before they spawn.

Penny wise and pound foolish much?

Many of the retired scientists are now seeking to continue their work — as volunteers, if the paperwork needed to do so will be approved by new leaders at NOAA, Morley said. But will it? To her these budget cuts weren’t about reducing spending at all, but shutting down the science itself, making their work, even done for free, unwelcome.

“These cuts have nothing to do with saving money,” she said. “It is about silencing people and destroying science.”

Penny stupid and pound foolish.