A military vet and a scientist were securing America’s food system. Trump fired them

Derek Copeland was 11 days away from hitting his one-year mark with the U.S. Department of Agriculture when he received his termination letter on Feb. 14.

“You have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the notice said.

Copeland was shocked. His performance appraisal stated that he was “fully successful” in performing the critical functions of his job as a training specialist at the National Detector Dog Training Center in Newnan, Ga.

Moreover, while he’d been at the USDA less than a year, he’d spent his career working with dogs. Copeland had recently retired from two decades of service in the Air Force, most of that time in canine units, running kennels and training dogs to sniff out narcotics and explosives, among other tasks.

In Georgia, his job was to train dogs and their handlers to find agricultural products that aren’t supposed to come into the U.S., a critical layer of protection for the U.S. food system.

“I gave blood, sweat and tears to this country for 20 years to continue service to the federal government, doing what I was trained to do by them,” he says. “I kind of feel like I was just thrown out like a piece of trash.”

Copeland is part of a slew of federal employees who’ve been fired in recent days. Now, many are vowing to fight back, and attorneys exploring legal action say they may have a case.

A mass firing of probationary employees

Since last week, the Trump administration has fired more than 10,000 federal employees, including at the National Institutes of Health, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Energy and elsewhere. Still more are getting termination letters this week.

It’s part of President Trump’s broader plan, executed in large part by his billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, to dramatically downsize the federal workforce from its current 2.3 million employees, eliminate waste and save American taxpayers money.

A majority of those fired were still considered probationary, a status that lasts one to three years, depending on the position. Federal employees gain civil service job protections only once their probationary period is up.

Already, the Alden Law Group and Democracy Forward, a nonprofit organization that’s a frequent foil of the Trump administration, have filed a classwide complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, asking it to intervene in the mass firings of probationary employees.

Attorneys elsewhere say the workers may have other pathways to contest their dismissals, based on the language in the termination letters.

“The suggestion that somehow their skills or their abilities or knowledge is not a fit, that’s probably defamatory — and definitely if there’s a statement that their performance was inadequate,” says David Branch, an employment attorney in Washington, D.C., who has sued federal agencies on behalf of federal workers for years.

“If you can prove that this statement is false,” he says, “you probably have a claim for infringement upon your good name and reputation under the Fifth Amendment.”

Research to secure America’s food supply

In Logan, Utah, Michelle Kirchner’s work was also directly tied to American food security.

A postdoctoral researcher with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, Kirchner had been hired last spring to run a project helping alfalfa growers in Western states control pests while protecting pollinating bees. Alfalfa crops support the U.S. dairy industry.

Kirchner spent last summer in eastern Washington state, where temperatures at times topped 100 degrees.

“There’s no shade because it’s just alfalfa as far as the eye can see, and the sun just beats down on you all day, and they’re just bugs everywhere,” she says.

And she loved it.

Kirchner spent her days sampling fields for pests and pollinators and talking with growers about their operations and their priorities for research. Her work was recognized with a performance award.

Then in January, she and a colleague won a $25,000 grant through the Alfalfa Pollinator Research Initiative to further their study into protecting pollinators. Their proposal was chosen by the growers themselves.

“They were very excited about it. I had many of them tell me that personally,” she says.

Over 10 months, Kirchner has submitted three peer-reviewed manuscripts for publication. Now, she fears the research is “dead in the water.”

“My supervisor looked at me and said, ‘We won’t be able to continue this without you,'” she says.

The USDA’s Bee Biology and Systematics Laboratory was founded in the late 1940s. Now, key members of the lab’s research team are gone. Kirchner is struggling to make sense of the dismantling.

“The Agricultural Research Service part of the USDA is usually pretty buffered from a lot of the more partisan political actions, just because it’s people’s food,” she says. “You shouldn’t mess with people’s food.”

Not a “surgical approach”

Copeland is equally confounded by the termination of probationary employees at the dog training center in Georgia.

“It makes absolutely zero sense,” he says.

Copeland says the center had been looking to hire more training specialists to fulfill a growing demand from U.S. Customs and Border Protection for dogs and handlers.

The law enforcement agency uses dogs at airport terminals and other ports of entry, screening bags, passengers, vehicles and cargo warehouses for products that pose a danger to America’s crops.

“There’s so, so many crazy different diseases that can really mess up our food system,” Copeland says.

He’s incensed at talk he has heard on television that the Trump administration is taking a “surgical approach” to firings while also weeding out lazy federal employees who don’t want to return to the office.

“We were in an office actually doing the work that secures and protects this nation’s borders, which supposedly is a big priority,” says Copeland. “It’s all bull****.”

Probationary employees are often “the most industrious”

In his more than three decades practicing employment law, Branch has never seen a purge like what has unfolded over the past week. The mass firing of newer employees doesn’t make much sense to him.

“Probationary employees are usually … the most industrious employees there,” he says. “These folks know that they have a year to prove themselves, some folks two years, and if they don’t, they can be terminated for any reason.”

The challenge, he says, will be convincing a federal judge that the termination letters are in fact defamatory.

Branch is urging federal employees who believe they were illegally fired to collect any feedback or comments they received that refute the government’s claim that their performance was somehow poor or inadequate.

“They can’t tarnish your reputation. They can’t infringe upon your liberty interest. You have a liberty interest in your name, in your reputation,” he says. “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty and property without due process of law.”

Have information you want to share about ongoing changes across the federal government? NPR’s Andrea Hsu can be contacted through encrypted communications on Signal at andreahsu.08.