Growing up, Sabrina Valenti felt like she was genetically predetermined to work for the government. Her dad's father was in the Navy. Her dad was in the Air Force. Two of her uncles served in the armed forces, one eventually moving to a job at NASA and the other leaving for the postal service. Her mom's father was a state senator in Maine. One of Valenti's sisters is a teacher, and the other works for a transit agency in a major American city. "I was going to work in the public sector, one way or another," Valenti said.
Valenti grew up in the Florida panhandle, where she witnessed Hurricane Katrina whip through the gulf. And she was in high school when the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and causing the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. During the spill, Valenti recalls seeing "no wake zone" signs everywhere to prevent boats' waves knocking tar balls ashore. Every day before school, Valenti would grab the newspaper from the front porch and see a photo of oil billowing out of a wellhead. For months, Valenti wondered if the paper would say that the well was finally capped. The spill was eventually contained after 87 days. "You're sitting there powerless, knowing that this oil is going to kill shorebirds and seabirds, that it's going to kill fish, that it's going to cause birth defects in dolphins," Valenti said.
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe stuck with Valenti. After a stint working for the Louisiana state government, she returned to her gulf roots by joining the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, or NOAA, first as a contractor in 2020 and later as a full-time budget analyst overseeing coastal restoration in Louisiana at NOAA's Office of Habitat Conservation. Valenti oversaw projects in jurisdictions experiencing the highest rate of coastal land loss in the entire country, and managed budgets for a program that has restored 14,000 acres of coastal wetlands in the state. "The Gulf Coast is experiencing the highest levels of sea level rise in the entire world, so it's just a really vulnerable place that we've done a lot of work to protect." Valenti said. "And it is gutting to think that that could just come to a halt."
On Feb. 27, Valenti was fired from NOAA as a part of the mass layoffs of probationary federal workers directed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. She was a year and nine months into her probationary period. I spoke with Valenti about the chaotic nature of her firing, her passion for public service, and her concerns for the future of coastal communities.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Could you talk about your path toward working for NOAA?
I went to Louisiana State University. While I was there, I was in the marching band, and I studied political science and economics and Spanish all at the same time. I wasn't really sure what direction I wanted to take my life in, but I had a feeling that I would want to end up in some kind of public service.
After a brief break post-grad, I started working for the Louisiana state government. In 2018 I worked for their Office of Planning and Budget. Handling random budgets taught me a lot of really great, useful skills, but I didn't feel super-enamored with the work that I did there, because it was just disconnected from me and from my experiences. So then I moved to D.C. in late 2019 and started working for NOAA right before the pandemic hit.
I was a budget analyst over there. But another big part of my duties was assisting the woman who managed what's called the DARRP, which stands for the Damage Assessment, Remediation, and Restoration Program. What the DARRP does, it was [established] after the Exxon Valdez oil spill back in 1989, and it's a revolving fund where polluters pay restitution to the U.S. government. Then we spend the money doing either damage assessment work or restoration work.
For me to go to LSU and get to graduate from college and get this job at NOAA, and then suddenly I'm working for the DARRP where we're getting hundreds of billions of dollars from BP, and we're the ones who are spending that money to study how the oil has impacted life throughout the water column in the ocean—studying the impacts it's had on dolphins further out at sea, or what it's done to the phytoplankton, or what happened in the near coastal wetland areas that are this really powerful filter for all of the water that interchanges between the Gulf of Mexico and the Intercoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River—it was just really amazing to see the personal become the professional.
I had this feeling that if I kept working as a contractor after long enough, I would get brought on as a fed somewhere. It just felt really amazing to know that my hard work and my patience had paid off, and that I would get to access this super-stable, predictable civil service job that felt like it was gonna alter the course of my life—bring together my desire for public service and my care for the environment, and this deep relationship that I have with an often-forgotten part of the country.
Was there anything about the Office of Habitat Conservation that you were attracted to?
NOAA does all kinds of work outside of weather prediction. There's space stuff, there's atmospheric stuff, there's river stuff, there's ocean stuff. There's so many bodies of water, and just general regulatory spheres that we can have an impact on. So in another universe, I guess it's possible that I could have gotten assigned to some deep, dark corner of a place doing atmospheric research, and I'm sitting there like, "I don't really care what's going on in the stratosphere. I have no personal connection to what's happening up there. I want to be at sea level." So I got my sea-level job where not just was it an area that I cared about, but specifically the job that I got into was doing the funding for coastal restoration in South Louisiana.
The reason I mentioned I was in [LSU's marching band] is that you go to every home game to play in the band. And before every home game, they play a hype video on the big Jumbotron. It starts with this man saying—I'm going to start crying—he says, "When the sun finds its home in the western sky over the father of waters," talking about the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is the American River, like Huckleberry Finn or fucking Grimes in her houseboat trying to sail down it from Minneapolis. It's the engine of economic prosperity that gave birth to the way that this country currently exists. I've seen it up in [the] northern end where my sister lives, and I've seen how skinny and clear and grassy it is—there's not industry going on. And I've seen it in Baton Rouge, where the levees are built to 41 feet tall. I've seen the river lick at the top of the top of levees, and it's that muddy brown when you get down into New Orleans. It's over a mile wide. You can't even imagine the force of water that's coursing through there. Just thinking about the people that have traveled that river, and the towns and communities that have sprung up around that river, and all of the animals and birds and plants and bugs that you don't even think about that call that river home—it just means so much to me.
That's really beautiful, thank you for sharing that. I was wondering if you could talk about what a day looked like in your work at NOAA?
The law authorizing my work is known as CWPPRA. That stands for the Coastal Wetlands Planning Protection and Restoration Act. It's also colloquially known as the Breaux Act after the Louisiana senator who spearheaded the legislation. It was passed in 1990 and the way that the law works, basically, is it sets up this three-way partnership between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an agency in the state of Louisiana called the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, and then one of five rotating federal partners. NOAA is one of those five partners. The Army Corps is basically the banker for it. They make the money available, and each of the five agencies will create bids for projects. When you win a bid, you get to engineer and design that project, and then you have to win a vote to get to construct your project that you've made the design for. So it's a little bit of a competitive process between the different agencies, just in this effort to make sure that the best and most cost-effective projects win.
I'm helping my program manager create a budget—figuring out exactly how much can we send to the state of Louisiana, how much is going to be our federal share, and how much is going to be our state share. So that means that you have to really meticulously track all the spending that's happening on the federal and state level so that when the project closes, you can balance the books and make sure that Louisiana wasn't paying more than they thought they would have to when the project was approved.
If this sounds really scary and complicated to you, that's fine. Even my colleagues are afraid of this program. I saw them yesterday, and they all gave me hugs, and they said, "We don't want to do CWPPRA. We need you to come back so that you can do CWPPRA, because we're afraid of it."
The tools that we have available to the job are obviously so different than they were 30 years ago. Excel can do radically different things than it could back then. So I was trying to do this total overhaul of everything at the same time as NOAA debuted a new finance system that was foisted upon us by the Department of Commerce that straight up did not work for six months after it launched. So the way I would describe it is, like, you're trying to renovate a bathroom. They turn the lights out and they say, "OK, do demo." You're like, OK. And so you tear out all the tiles, and you smash up the sink, and you rip the drywall off, and you're cutting out the pipes to replace them. And then they turn the lights on, that starts working, and then they say, "Yeah, we're actually going to need you to leave. You're not mission-critical." And you're sitting there, like, well, where are you going to piss? There's no toilet. That's what they did by getting rid of me.
Could give me an example or two of one of these restoration projects that you were managing?
There's this small fishing community called Delacroix, and Delacroix is a historic fishing community. Actually, if you know the Bob Dylan song "Tangled Up in Blue," he talks about being on a boat in Delacroix. If you think of Louisiana as a boot, it's like the tip of the boot.
These small communities are super-vulnerable, especially Delacroix, being so economically dependent on the fishing industry. Something about all these towns in South Louisiana that are in kind of quasi-land, not-land, is that their hurricane evacuation routes actually run along the levees. And so if the levees are put in danger by storm surge, that means the road gets overtopped with water, and then you're stuck. You are SOL. Down there it's so flat that even the faintest bit of wind will push a ton of storm surge out of the Gulf and into the towns. They needed these fortifications to be built basically crosswise to the levees to protect the levees from that danger. And now I don't know if that's going to happen.
And a big problem with this is that, you know, say my co-workers do make time in their day to take on my portfolio. That might not happen for a few weeks as they rework their workload. It's already March, and hurricane season starts in May or June. What's going to happen most likely because of the way that the financial deadlines work in the federal government, is these funds are not going to be able to be granted out until fiscal [2026], and fiscal [2026] starts in the last month of hurricane season. So we're leaving these communities vulnerable for at least an additional season of storms, on top of what they've already dealt with and would have already been dealing with, just because someone had to make a point and fire me.
Let's talk about your firing. Could you walk me through what that process looked like on your end?
So I knew Project 2025 had a page that said they wanted to dismantle NOAA. I had a colleague start in my office—he was fired as well—from the private sector in September. Around October, November, we were talking about Project 2025, and I sent him the link to the chapter, and I said, you know on page two it says "We're going to dismantle NOAA." And he clicked on it, and he read it, he said, "Holy shit. I really didn't think it was just going to say, plainly, we want to dismantle NOAA, but it does." And so I started to be a little worried.
On [February] 27, I was leaving early that day to get a haircut, and I was like, they said I can't competently telework from home, so I'll lock my computer up at my desk, and I'll leave at 3:30 and I'll go get my hair cut. So I'm on the bus to the hair salon, and I had gotten a message at 12 that day from my contact [at NOAA] that said emails are going to start coming soon, and then a "fingers crossed" emoji for me.
My supervisor calls me and she's panicked, and she says, "Your coworker got his email, and people in the rest of our office I've gotten their emails as well." And so I'm like, "Well, fuck."
I'm frantically checking my inbox. I'm checking that folder, I'm checking spam. I don't see anything on my phone. I get my stupid little haircut, and I'm anxious the entire time, telling my hairdresser about it. I'm walking home. I'm refreshing. I'm refreshing. I still don't see anything. I went out that night for dinner, for a belated birthday dinner with my friends. I think we met at six, and through 6:30 I was still refreshing, and not seeing an email.
We start cheersing over dinner with our wine, like, "I can't believe I didn't get fired yet!" I'm walking home giddy, like, I can't believe I didn't get fired yet. And I get home and I had accumulated a lot of texts over dinner from friends who had seen the news and were texting me, are you good? Are you good? Are you good? And I had texted all them to reassure them, to reassure them, and I was like, you know what? Let me just double check one more time to make sure I'm good. So I go to my work email on my phone, and I go to toggle the account back on, and it shows that I'm signed out.
That is extremely chaotic.
It does get stupider, by the way. Do you have follow-up questions, or do you want to hear the stupid stuff first?
I want to hear the stupid stuff.
I went into the office on Monday morning. Got there at right at nine, because I wanted to get my termination letter and talk to people and get my shit off my desk before the rally that was planned outside my building. And I'm now going to read you my termination letter. It says: "On July 2, 2023 the agency appointed you to the position of research biologist." Now you've only known me for the last 30 minutes. I'm not a research biologist. So, they can't even fucking fire me right?
I didn't get the opportunity to tell any of my colleagues goodbye. I didn't get the opportunity to set an out-of-office bounce email that would explain that I've been terminated. And then adding insult to injury is you don't even know what fucking job I did. I have to laugh, honestly. It is comical. They're stupid and they're assholes. So I really do feel mostly aggrieved and not sad, because I just know that they're wrong and I'm right.
Obviously, all of the public reaction to NOAA focuses on scientists, because we're the science agency. We have the meteorologists and the oceanographers and the whoever else. You can't do science without money, and you can't do money if you fired all the people who do money.
Is there anything else that you would want to share with readers about your situation, or NOAA's situation?
Number one is just my concern about this desire to privatize NOAA. Many inside the agency assume that Howard Lutnick and Neil Jacobs have told or will tell lies in their respective confirmation hearings about dismantling NOAA. AccuWeather has wanted to charge for the free weather data that the [National] Weather Service provides for years and years and years, and has lobbied to that end. So there's a lot of powerful monied interests that want to put what NOAA does behind a paywall. And that's extra-crazy, because the private sector doesn't want to pay for the stuff that we do. They don't actually want to pay for the weather data because they're cheap. They don't want to pay for coastal wetland restoration work because they're cheap. They don't want to pay for oil spill cleanup there. But the work that we do generates a crazy return on investment. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you dismantle NOAA, you also are pretty much promising that people are going to get Vibrio [infections] when they eat oysters and then die of food poisoning. You're promising that they're going to drown in their homes because they couldn't evacuate from a hurricane. You're promising that will be more oil and chemical spills on waterways around the country, not just in South Louisiana, that won't get cleaned up because there's no one to do the cleanup.
For all of this, like, "the private sector is more efficient"? They don't want to spend money on this stuff, because they don't get to solely reap the benefits of the work that we do. The work that we do benefits the American people. And when I say the American people, I mean all of them, not just the ones who are wealthy, not just the ones who live in certain locations. Every single person who lives near body of water, whether it's a river, a gulf, an ocean, they benefit from the work that NOAA does. For the dismantling to be proceeding apace, it's destroying the hopes of thousands of people who have dreamed of public service. I have colleagues who were fired who wanted to work at NOAA since they were in elementary school. And the reason that we do our jobs is because we're passionate about the subject. We're passionate about the mission. And we're passionate about serving the entire country, everyone.
And so we have this dedication to the mission. But how now can we trust our employer when we've been fired for bullshit reasons, even if they invited us all back? To award us the civil-service protections that we know we're entitled to? So that we can take this relatively lower public-sector pay to do jobs that we care about and turn our backs on whatever stupid stock options or—I don't know what you get the private sector, because I've never worked there—but there's a whole universe of pay and benefits that we are purposely declining because we care so much about what we do. Overall, if I had to unify that into a couple topics, it would be safety and it would be the economy. It's seafood. It's storms. It's the clean air you breathe. It's the water that you swim in. It's everything.
