The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Livestock Behavior Research Unit, the primary federal lab dedicated to farm animal welfare research, has been decimated — with now just one scientist remaining on staff — by the Trump Administration’s mass firings of federal employees, Sentient confirmed with two former laboratory staff members. The unit’s research — over the course of three decades — helped develop the scientific measures for animal welfare on farms and informed some regulatory standards, such as Proposition 12.
“Without the scientists, the unit will be earmarked for closure, I’m sure,” Jeremy Marchant, who worked as an animal research scientist at the lab between 2001 and 2023 and maintains communication with the team, wrote in an e-mail to Sentient. “To see it be dismantled like this is heart-breaking and bad for U.S. farm animal welfare.”
The world-class research institution’s animal scientists — Jessica Pempek and Kaitlin Wurtz, who were both probationary employees — were both fired on February 13, leaving just Heng-wei Cheng as the sole scientist remaining. These terminations came at the directive of the Trump Administration’s Office of Personnel Management, which ordered federal agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees — a sweeping, abrupt overhaul affecting hundreds of thousands of staff in the first few years on the job.
The loss of the probationary scientists gutted an already short-staffed laboratory, yet to hire replacements for Marchant and another scientist who left in 2024.
“The unit was already down from five scientists to three scientists,” Marchant tells Sentient, in an interview. “And then with the hiring freeze coming in straight away, it meant that we could no longer be replaced, and then two of the three [scientists] were still in their probationary period. So, now it’s down to one scientist who is due for retirement anytime soon.”
Sentient called Pempek on February 14, as she was packing her office to confirm her termination. She described the firings as “catastrophic” for farm animal welfare research.
Sentient could not get ahold of Wurtz by phone or e-mail. The auto-response to her U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) e-mail states, “I am no longer with the USDA-ARS Livestock Behavior Research Unit, and this email is no longer being monitored.” Following a brief phone call, Pempek did not respond to further interview requests.
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