Bryn Webber showed up at the Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge first thing in the morning on Feb. 28 to volunteer to survey for avian botulism, a bacterial disease that is deadly to waterbirds.
Had Webber been standing in that same spot doing the same work just two weeks prior, she wouldn’t have been a volunteer. She would have been a paid field biologist employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Webber is one of more than 16,000 probationary federal workers who were terminated in February as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the government.
The move targeted employees at several federal agencies, including the USFWS, which oversees hundreds of national wildlife refuges across the country. On Valentine's Day, four employees who worked across Kauaʻi’s three USFWS refuges lost their jobs.
HPR spoke with Webber and two of her colleagues in the weeks following their terminations.
All three described feeling called to their work with the federal government and had planned to be in their positions long-term. Then, almost in an instant, the careers they had put at the center of their lives evaporated.
All three federal employees were offered their jobs back in March. But a tumultuous month had eroded their sense of security about their employment, and they all questioned whether they’d be on sure footing if they returned.
The damage was done — only one went back.
Bryn Webber: “My dream job of all dream jobs”
In Hanalei, Webber tried to put her concerns about her future aside for a few hours in order to focus on the task at hand: botulism surveillance.
“This work still needs to continue, so I'm out here today,” she said.
Before her termination, Webber oversaw the refuge’s botulism surveillance program. Botulism is caused by a bacterium present in soil. Under certain conditions, the bacterium “blooms” and produces a neurotoxin that can be fatal to birds if ingested. Left unchecked, botulism outbreaks can do serious damage to waterfowl populations, particularly the endangered koloa maoli, or Hawaiian duck, according to Webber.
“These birds depend on us,” she said. “It's not like we can just walk away and stop doing the work and expect that everything is going to be fine.”
Although Webber’s employment status with USFWS was probationary — meaning she had been in her position for less than a year — the refuges were familiar turf. Webber has worked a series of field and research roles on Kauaʻi for the past decade, beginning with a KUPU AmeriCorps position in 2016.
It’s common to bounce around in conservation, where employment is often low-paying or seasonal. Field researchers like Webber are used to cobbling together different jobs to make ends meet.
“In this career, you pretty much can never guarantee a permanent or a stable salary,” she said, “especially in Hawaiʻi, where the cost of living is just outrageous.”
For Webber, working with the USFWS offered the rare opportunity to do what she loved while also having some promise of stability.
“Honestly, it was my dream job of all dream jobs,” she said. “I was building my life around that job, and I didn't have a plan B or C, because that was it.”
Daniela Casillas: “We chose you because we needed you for this role”
Daniela Casillas liked her job with the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaiʻi, but working with USFWS had been her dream since college.
“I really stand by their mission and the work that they do,” she said. “It was really the highest standard of work I could see myself doing.”
She applied for an opening as a biological science technician at the Kauaʻi refuge complex in 2023, even though she thought it was a “total long shot” that she’d get the job.
But after a monthslong application process, Casillas was hired, and she started in the field in August 2024.
Six months later, she was abruptly fired via a Microsoft Teams meeting.
Casillas got a pit in her stomach when the meeting began, which she said was led by the USFWS Region 1 director. The chat function was disabled, and the other participants were hidden from view.
“You could tell that they were pretty mortified to share the news,” she said of her superiors. “They really made sure to say, ‘This is nothing that you did wrong. We chose you because we needed you for this role that you're in. Again, this is nothing you did wrong.’”
Casillas later received an email from the federal Office of Personnel Management that stated, “the Department has determined your knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department's current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate during your probationary period your appointment to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service."
But Casillas knew it wasn’t true that her “knowledge, skills, and abilities” weren’t needed. In fact, she had just been told that her work was mission-critical.
As the federal government flirted with the idea of a shutdown in late 2024, her office came up with a plan for who would stay on and who would be furloughed if federal services were suspended.
Casillas was told that she would be the only one from the biology team who would continue to work as normal due to the importance of her work with endangered species.
“It's just really ironic that just a month before getting fired, I was going to continue working through a government shutdown, because the work we do is absolutely essential,” she said.
Like Webber, Casillas valued the stability her role had afforded her, and she had started to make big decisions about her future based on the career she had envisioned with the USFWS. In the six months Casillas was employed, she and her husband bought a vacant lot and had plans to build a small home.
“Part of why we made this commitment was because we both had stable jobs, and I could foresee what my income was going to be for these next few years,” she said.
Steven Minamishin: “This is what I’m put on Earth to do”
Steven Minamishin left the lucrative construction industry after 12 years in order to find work that better aligned with his values.
He found it on the wildlife refuge of Johnston Atoll, where he served as a crew leader mentoring his fellow volunteers.
“It was an epiphany,” he said. “It was like, ‘OK, this is what I’m put on Earth to do.’”
After that, Minamishin threw himself wholeheartedly into conservation work. He started as a field technician with the USFWS on Kauaʻi in 2019, and last year he was promoted to the maintenance lead and collateral duty safety officer.
“I didn't want to go any higher than this. I wanted to do at least 15 years, if not longer in this position,” he said.
In that supervisory role, Minamishin felt he could chip away at his long-term goal: hiring locally.
When he started with USFWS, Minamishin said he knew only one other person on staff who was from Hawaiʻi.
“Growing up here in Hawaiʻi, you have a deep-seated connection to the islands, and I wanted to see more people like my cousins and people who I grew up with in a sort of field like this,” he said.
Minamishin knew local people who wanted to work in conservation but didn’t know how to get their feet in the door — he wanted to give them an opening.
He also knew that many in the community didn’t trust the federal government, which is the second-largest landowner in Hawaiʻi.
But he believed in the mission of USFWS. The agency oversees over 1,000 acres on Kauaʻi, and he wanted the community to be able to see the value in that work.
“I felt like it was going to take me 15 to 20 years to establish this culture of trust for the federal government that has seemingly been lost,” he said.
In February, Minamishin was told to log on to the same Teams call as Casillas and was informed that probationary workers were being fired.
At first, he didn’t understand how the meeting applied to him. After all, he’d been a federal employee with Kauaʻi’s refuges for the last six years.
But Minamishin soon discovered that because he had been promoted to a new position within the last year, he’d been lumped in with the recent hires. He had lost his job, and with it, his hopes of changing the face of USFWS.
“I thought I was in a position of making change, and it's like I just got that ripped away,” he said.
Minamishin: "It was the love of my life”
A few weeks after Webber, Casillas and Minamishin were fired, a federal judge ruled that the terminations of probationary workers at USFWS and a handful of other agencies were illegal and directed the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of employees.
But probationary employees aren’t out of the woods. Last week, the Supreme Court paused the federal judge’s order. An appeals court also blocked a separate order to rehire federal workers in response to a lawsuit brought by Hawaiʻi and 18 other states.
USFWS did not respond to a request for comment.
Casillas said she got a phone call offering her her job back on Saint Patrick's Day — a month after she had been terminated. She said no.
“If you would have told me a year ago, you'd be offered a permanent biological technician position with Fish and Wildlife Service, and you're gonna pass it up, I would say, you're crazy,” she said.
Casillas longed to return to her work on the refuges, but she didn’t trust that her position with USFWS would be secure. She and her husband were working to build their house, settle down, and potentially start a family, and she needed some degree of financial stability.
“The position is not what it once was,” Casillas said, noting that many people who sign up to work for the USFWS see it as a lifelong commitment.
The same morning Casillas received the call from USFWS, she accepted her old job back with the University of Hawaiʻi.
“The stability has to take priority for me right now,” she said.
Webber is the only one of the three who elected to return to USFWS. She shared the news with HPR over text in late March.
In a conversation prior to her return to the USFWS, Webber said she would take her job back if it was offered to her, but that it wouldn’t hold the same mystique it once had.
“[It] would basically just be a financial decision at this point to see what happens and see where the cards land,” Webber said. “I don't know if working at the Fish and Wildlife Service anymore is what it was cracked up to be.”
Like Casillas, Minamishin is returning to the work he thought he’d left behind. When HPR spoke with him in early April, he shared that he had accepted a job with a construction company based in Alaska.
Minamishin, who had once dreamed of building a bridge of trust between the community and federal agencies like USFWS, had himself lost trust in the highest levels of federal government under President Donald Trump.
“A change in administration could sway me back, but right now, it's just too much,” he said.
Minamishin visited the refuge in March for the first time after he was fired, which he said felt like “going through the craziest breakup of your life and then going to your ex's house.”
He found some degree of closure speaking with volunteers and seeing their commitment to protecting Kauaʻi’s wildlife. He plans to return as a volunteer as well, albeit an extremely overqualified one. But that won’t be the same as working alongside Webber and Casillas.
“We were a team,” Minamishin said. “People have asked me, what do we do every day? We collaborate. That's what we do.”
Minamishin said it broke his heart not to return to the USFWS and Kīlauea Point National Wildlife Refuge.
“I deeply love our refuge, with all my heart,” he said. “It was the love of my life.”
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