The National Science Foundation fired nearly 170 workers in a zoom call on Tuesday morning as part of the Trump administration’s agenda to reduce the federal workforce. The terminated workers, who were told that their service would end at 17:00 EST today, have those who still have a probationary period.

Earlier this month, however, these permanent workers suddenly said through NSF that their one -year probationary period should have been two years and that they were no longer safe to end.

The Trump administration has ordered the federal agencies to fire almost all trials who have not yet obtained permanent status and thus receive the protection of the public service. But NSF workers who believed they were safe found themselves without work.

The National Science Foundation is an independent agency within the federal government that provides universities and other bodies to support scientific and engineering research. The grants of the foundation account for about a quarter of all federal support to academic institutions for research. NSF’s grants were interrupted at the end of January due to a freezing point of financing, but the agency resumed the grants after a court order early this month.

Many of the people have terminated work on Tuesday as program managers and experts who make decisions on funding by aligning research proposals with the right program and suiting the proposals to the most qualified judges to judge it and make recommendations.

“It’s hard to suggest that it is successfully achieved with automatic algorithms,” one fired program manager told Wired. “With fewer program officials to manage the evaluation process, the overwhelming concern is that it will become more difficult to identify and support the transformative but unconventional projects that can otherwise be game changes in terms of promoting scientific progress in the US.”

All the sources that spoke to Wired requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

According to sources, 168 workers received EST ‘Ne post this morning at 09:02 to request their presence to call at 10:00 for a “meeting with NSF test staff.” However, many workers did not receive the zoom link and missed the beginning of the call. During the meeting, they were told that their network access would be excluded at 1 p.m. and that they could figure out their desks until 5pm, although workers were told that accommodation would be made to obtain things that they could not clean up against against 5pm.

The termination action this morning also included all permanent employees who were named ‘will-will’ workers. One terminated worker told Wired that they were a permanent federal employee who worked part -time, with an annual contract renewed in September.

The decision to end at-Will employees comes from NSF alone, not from the administration, the NSF management told workers at the meeting. When asked if at-Will employees were just terminated from fairness to the subject staff, the NSF management replied that the decision was “partly due to fairness, but that’s not all.”