Dwindling water reserves are a common foe for agricultural producers in northeastern Colorado, where climate change is rapidly withering soils and eroding ranchland. As an agricultural engineer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, Matthew O’Malley’s entire job was structured around helping farmers and ranchers implement more efficient infrastructure to deal with growing water scarcity.

On any given day, that could involve anything from building an irrigation system that cuts down on the amount of water released to feed thirsty crops or designing a retention basin to store any excess water produced during rainy periods as an emergency cattle stockpile for drier ones.

That work was disrupted on February 13, when O’Malley was abruptly fired from his position in a wave of mass layoffs enacted by the Trump administration. By the end of the following month, he’d be temporarily invited back, after a federal court ruled the thousands of laid off government workers must be reinstated. But O’Malley would never end up returning to office, instead electing to take the deferred resignation he was subsequently offered. Until September 30, he remains a federal employee on paper — just one who is not allowed to work.

Before the mass government firings hit the NRCS offices in northeast Colorado, there were a total of four staffers, O’Malley included, serving as agricultural engineers in the region. Half took the deferred resignation.

“The planning stopped for the projects I was designing overnight,” said O’Malley. “I’m more concerned for the smaller agricultural producers, rather than myself, for the agency. They’re the ones that rely on USDA programs to help them make it through years when there’s crop failure.”

Because of the economic landscape, escalating extreme weather risk, and intensifying water scarcity, farmer need for federal support in the region is at a demand level he’s never before seen. “Agricultural producers are already living on the fringes of income,” he said. “Helping these producers protect the resources that they have, and allowing them to better utilize them, ultimately helps everyone. We all need to eat.”

Emily Graslie is one of those you might not think of when you picture the work that’s being lost as a result of federal staff and funding cuts. She’s a science communicator who creates YouTube videos explaining all kinds of scientific research in fun, easy-to-understand ways. You may have stumbled across her channel, The Brain Scoop — or others like it — in your YouTube browsing, where she’s covered topics ranging from what fossils can teach us about climate change to how the city of Chicago is addressing its rat problem. She’s produced hundreds of videos and gained over 600,000 followers.

Graslie is closely involved with the community of science communicators, including a group of primarily women and nonbinary creators. “The majority of us own and manage our own production companies, which involves negotiating contracts on a per-project basis,” Graslie told Grist. “We’re most excited when we get money from a science org that ‘gets us’ — like from a science center, or through a library outreach grant.” So it was a dream come true when she landed a gig working with the National Institutes of Health to create videos sharing and demystifying work from the largest medical research organization in the world.

She was supposed to be on campus at the NIH in January of this year to begin shooting for the series, which had already been in development for a year. Instead, she received an email telling her that the project was on hold until further notice.

“I found out from the press — I found out from a news headline that there was this communications gag for NIH,” she said, referencing a memo issued by the acting Health and Human Services secretary within the first days of the Trump administration, halting nearly all external communications. “Because I’m considered a member of the media, I was unable to communicate with these people I had been partnering with for over a year.”

Many people may not realize, Graslie said, that the federal funding that supports scientific research and programming at museums and libraries also often covered contracts with independent creators like herself, to help communicate the work to the public. Without it, she fears that work like hers will be increasingly difficult to sustain.

“Online science content has never been lucrative,” she said, and these cuts are likely to push many people out of the space — especially creators who come from marginalized backgrounds, and can’t afford to invest time and energy into these projects without adequate pay.

“One of the most significant things that The Brain Scoop did is just share the different kinds of work that happens at nature centers and museums across the country, across the world. I think the loss — it’s just a limiting of people’s understandings of what they’re capable of, who they want to be when they grow up, how they see the world around them,” Graslie said.

“I just see this flattening of imagination. And that to me is the most terrifying thing. A lack of imagination leads to a lack of problem-solving, a lack of critical thinking. That is what’s at risk here.”

Read more: Even your favorite YouTube creators are feeling the effects of federal cuts

– Claire Elise Thompson

Since January, Rachel Suber had been a member of FEMA Corps, a specialized program of Americorps, the federal national service program, which deploys volunteers to disaster zones to aid in recovery. A Pennsylvania native, she’d been assigned to Harrisburg, PA to help those affected by Hurricane Debby, a slow tropical cyclone that flooded parts of the Northeast last summer.

Harrisburg suffered some of the worst damage in the northeast, with a tornado and catastrophic flooding. More than 180 homes in the state were destroyed or severely damaged. As a FEMA Corps volunteer, Rachel was part of the FEMA team on the ground to assist with recovery. She would go out in the field with her supervisors to townships affected by the storm to survey damage and help people access the federal assistance funding available through FEMA. Back at the office, she would capture information about what had been done at site inspections, where the worst damage was, and who had yet to receive assistance.

Everything changed on April 15. Rumors started swirling about an impromptu emergency meeting scheduled that day. In the afternoon, Suber got a notification from the social media site Reddit. It said her program — and all of AmeriCorps — was being demobilized. A couple of minutes later, her team leader confirmed it. “We will be demobilized immediately,” she remembers her boss saying. “I’m going to miss you all.”

Suber and her cohort were aware of the changes President Donald Trump was making to FEMA and other federal programs, but the funding for her program was allocated for the year. No one thought the new administration could take it away. “We’ll at least be able to finish,” Suber thought.

So far, FEMA’s work in the region continues, but without help from the corps members, Suber says more work will be put on program managers in Harrisburg, who will be forced to do site inspections and manage disaster assistance applications simultaneously, slowing the process of getting aid to those who need it.

For her, and others in the FEMA Corps and Americorps program, it’s also the end of an opportunity for valuable on the job training and new opportunities.

Suber grew up in the Poconos — visitors know the area as a vacation destination, but Suber knows it as a place where a young adult without a college degree can’t get hired for anything other than a job in retail. She applied for the FEMA Corps program as a way to get out of rural Pennsylvania. “I was saying to myself, ‘OK, I can have a job with FEMA, I could actually have a career,’” she said. “It offered housing, your food was paid for. I didn’t really have to worry about how I would survive.” Plus, she would probably get to work in California, Hawai’i, or another state far away — the kinds of states that saw huge fires or hurricanes and were always in the news.

Ending up in Harrisburg wasn’t the plan. She and about 130 other FEMA Corps members were flown to Vicksburg, Mississippi for a few weeks of training earlier this year. A week in, Suber and her cohort were told where they’d be going for their service. Some corps members would indeed go to an exotic state far away, but not Suber. Still, she had a job she could proudly put on her resume, along with newfound administrative skills. With the end of the program, less than 4 months into what should have been a 10-month assignment, Suber’s dreams of working for FEMA or going to a tropical state have faded. Right now, she’s just looking for a new job.

– Zoya Teirstein

Caroline Frischmon was expecting to receive a $1.2 million grant from the EPA to study air pollution in Cherokee Forest, a neighborhood in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The neighborhood, which is near a Chevron refinery, a superfund site, and a liquefied natural gas terminal, has more than three times the amount of cancer risk the EPA deems acceptable. But earlier this year, after initially greenlighting her grant, the EPA abruptly reversed course. The funding was part of EPA’s Science to Achieve Results, or STAR, an initiative that has awarded more than 4,100 grants nationwide since 1995. The program primarily funded academics with scientific and engineering expertise to conduct high-quality environmental and public health research. Earlier this year, the Trump administration canceled $1.5 billion in environmental justice grants, and in April, EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin ordered the termination of STAR and eight other programs.

With those changes, Frischmon’s funding evaporated overnight. As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, she had set up low-cost air monitors in Cherokee Forest and identified a recurring pattern of short-lived, intense pollution episodes that correlated with residents’ complaints of burning eyes, sore throats, and nausea. Her research identified a gap in the state’s air quality monitoring. State monitors averaged pollution levels over hours or days but missed short-term spikes that were just as consequential to human health. By the time state officials came out to investigate residents’ complaints, the pollution had dissipated.

“The validation has really led to an activation in the community,” said Frischmon. “People felt like their concerns were real and that they deserved better.”

Frischmon funded that work with a $5,000 grant from the university and had major plans for expanded air monitoring in the community with the $1.2 million EPA grant. She had hoped to undertake a multi-year air quality study, paying community members for their time, and working with anthropologists to contextualize the data beyond just the numbers. The grant was supposed to pay for her post-doctoral position at the university. Frischmon is now job hunting and searching for smaller grants, but she isn’t optimistic she will find funding on the scale of the EPA grant. The community, too, is disappointed by the setback, she said.

“They haven’t had the federal support that they had under the Biden administration, and it went a long way,” said Frischmon. “So there’s a lot of sadness over losing that momentum.”

– Naveena Sadasivam

Every year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, places roughly 150 fellows at various federal agencies. The program is well-reputed, and the positions are highly coveted. Established in 1973, it provides a pipeline for scientists to enter public service. Shane Coffield was one of six fellows placed at the EPA last September. As a researcher with a doctorate in Earth system science, Coffield specialized in various remote sensing techniques and was tasked with working on the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, a dataset of the country’s emissions. The inventory, which covers greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, transportation, and electricity production, among other sectors, provides a baseline for climate policy and has been published since the early 1990s. The U.S. is also obligated to provide the emissions data every year to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international body that oversees global climate negotiations.

In April, the agency missed a deadline to turn over the data, even though Coffield and others at the EPA had completed work on the inventory. That month, it also terminated its agreement with AAAS that allowed Coffield and five other fellows to work at the agency. It’s unclear if the agency will produce the inventory next year.

The greenhouse gas inventory is “policy agnostic,” said Coffield. “It’s just about having the info that policymakers need to make decisions. Without it, we’re flying blind.”

During the eight months Coffield worked at the agency, he helped improve how the agency collected and analyzed land emissions data. The most meaningful work, Coffield said, involved helping developing countries such as El Salvador and South Africa build their own greenhouse gas inventories. When the Trump administration instructed staff to drop all foreign aid work in late January, Coffield could not engage with his international counterparts anymore.

“It’s disappointing because in the seven months, I never really got to package something and finish it and say that I did this,” said Coffield. “It feels like really a waste of a lot of effort of my time and of taxpayer resources for that much investment only for the rug to be pulled out.”

– Naveena Sadasivam

When EPA employees engage with communities affected by an environmental disaster, they often face angry and distrustful crowds. These communities are often the ones that have been historically neglected by the federal government, and residents may be dealing with serious health problems. During public meetings, frustrated residents sometimes turn their ire on the very staff tasked with providing support to the community.

Amelia Hertzberg was training staff to stay calm and engage productively in those situations. She was placed on administrative leave in April and expects to be fired in the coming weeks.

After graduating with a master’s in public health from George Mason University in 2022, Hertzberg began working at the EPA first as a fellow and then as a full-time employee in the community engagement office. There she helped communicate the risk that ethylene oxide, a toxic chemical used in sterilization, poses to communities. Then, as the EPA ramped up its efforts to work with historically disadvantaged communities during the Biden administration, she moved to the environmental justice office. There she conducted trauma-informed trainings for staff who worked directly with communities.

“Again and again, I heard, ‘I don’t know how to deal with people’s emotions,’” recalled Hertzberg. “‘There’s things that I can’t help them with that make me upset, and I don’t know what to do with my feelings of stress or theirs.’ And so I was trying to meet that need.”

The Trump administration has been taking steps to dismantle the environmental justice office over the last few months. In April, it announced that it would lay off 280 employees who worked in the office and reassign an additional 175 people. The announcement came after a February notice that placed 170 staff members, including Hertzberg, on administrative leave. Just two of the 11 people on Hertzberg’s community engagement team stayed on, and most of their programs have been cancelled.

“The environmental justice office is the EPA’s triage unit,” Hertzberg said. “The team was part of a nationwide push to build trust with communities so that we could better understand what they needed so that the government could serve communities better.”

– Naveena Sadasivam

First established some 25 years ago, in a historically underserved area that has long struggled with access to healthy food, the small but thriving garden is now a mainstay in the Mendota Elementary School curriculum. The produce grown there is routinely collected and taken to local food pantries. Later this spring, the third grade class plans to plant watermelon and pumpkin seeds. Come summer, the garden will open to the surrounding community to harvest crops like garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, collards, and squash, and take home what they need.

“They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil, because they’re healthy and they’re happy and they have sunshine, and they’ve watered them,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a Wisconsin nonprofit community agricultural organization that helps oversee the garden.

Back in January, the Rooted team applied for a $100,000 two-year grant through the Department of Agriculture’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School program, intended to provide public schools with locally produced fresh vegetables as well as food and agricultural education. Rooted had plans to “use a huge chunk of those funds” to continue supporting school garden activities and food programming at three local schools, including Mendota.

In March, the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, sent them an email announcing the cancellation of funding for grants through the program. The email, shared with Grist, noted that the cancellation is “in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government and DEI Programs and Preferencing.’”

The loss of the funds is “so upsetting,” said Krug, and the reasoning provided, she continued, is “ridiculous.”

In prior years, Krug said, “we were being asked ‘What are you doing to address equity? To address diversity? How are you making sure your project is for everyone?’ And now we’re going to be penalized for talking about that.”

The team at Rooted is now working overtime to find other funding sources to continue the work, including hosting a fundraising drive and benefit concert next month at their urban farm site. Krug hopes the proceeds will help offset some of the loss. “We’re not ready to say, without this funding, that we’re going to abandon this program, because we believe so strongly in it,” she said.

Read more: Trump’s latest USDA cuts undermine his plan to ‘Make America Healthy Again’