Federal court rulings in California and Maryland have ordered multiple government agencies to reinstate probationary employees who they say were unlawfully terminated under directives from the Office of Personnel Management.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of California found that the firings violated legal protections, while U.S. District Judge James Bredar of Maryland ruled that the Trump administration had failed to follow proper procedures for large-scale layoffs, including providing a 60-day advance notice.
As a result, 14 federal departments — including Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs — along with several agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have been ordered to offer reinstatement to affected employees.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture released the following statement regarding the status of probationary employees:
“On Wednesday, March 5, the Merit Systems Protection Board issued a 45-day stay on the termination of U.S. Department of Agriculture probationary employees. By Wednesday, March 12, the Department will place all terminated probationary employees in pay status and provide each with back pay, from the date of termination. The Department will work quickly to develop a phased plan for return-to-duty, and while those plans materialize, all probationary employees will be paid.”
According to Newsweek, Alsup’s ruling imposed a preliminary injunction that will remain in place indefinitely until a final decision is reached. Bredar’s ruling is set to last 14 days but may be extended as the lawsuit progresses.
Alsup, appointed by President Bill Clinton, acknowledged that federal law permits agencies to conduct a “reduction-in-force,” the government’s term for mass layoffs, but only if they meet specific legal requirements.
“It can be done if it’s in accordance with the law,” he stated according to CBS News. “This case is not about that. What this case is about is really an attempt to do a reduction-in-force” through the Office of Personnel Management. He criticized OPM’s directive for firing probationary employees, calling it a “gimmick” and an “easy way to get a reduction-in-force underway.”
U.S. Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) recently reintroduced a bill to assist agricultural producers after adverse weather events.
The Livestock Disaster Assistance Improvement Act directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve the accuracy of the U.S. Drought Monitor, which factors into disaster programs.
“South Dakota farmers and ranchers are all too familiar with working through extreme weather conditions, especially drought,” Thune said. “These common-sense updates to disaster programs would help provide greater and expedited assistance to producers when they need it the most. I’m proud to lead this bipartisan legislation that would make the Drought Monitor a more effective tool and help ensure USDA programs are using accurate and consistent data in administering programs that are designed to help the agriculture community.”
Some of the information from the legislation would include clarifying state and federal grazing permit holders who are eligible for the Emergency Conservation Program and the Emergency Forest Restoration Program.
One example would be the Farm Service Agency, which waives the 30-day public comment period for Bureau of Land Management National Environmental Policy Act applications during a drought emergency. Another area was the BLM accepting archeological reviews completed by Natural Resource Conservation Service field staff during a drought emergency.
Along with the USDM, the legislation would look at the Livestock Forage Program, which could allow a one-month payment when a county reaches D2 (severe drought) for four consecutive weeks compared to eight weeks under the current law.
“Drought, wildfires, and extreme weather are making it harder for New Mexico’s farmers and ranchers to care for livestock, grow crops, and support our communities,” Luján said. “As a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, I’m proud to reintroduce this bipartisan legislation to help farmers and ranchers get the support they need when disaster strikes. USDA programs must respond faster and more effectively to provide the relief New Mexicans deserve. This legislation will help our agricultural producers weather the impacts of extreme weather and disasters and keep contributing to our economy and food security.”
Researchers at UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute successfully developed pig retinal organoids, finding they share similarities with human retinal organoids, making pigs a valuable model for testing ocular therapeutics.
By leveraging single-cell RNA sequencing and immunocytochemistry, scientists identified key genetic and cellular similarities between pig and human photoreceptors, advancing the potential for stem cell-based vision restoration.
The study, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, aims to explore cell replacement therapy for retinal injuries common in the military, with ongoing pig transplants to assess the integration of lab-grown photoreceptors.
DAILY Discussion
Inside the human eye, the retina is made up of several types of cells, including the light-sensing photoreceptors that initiate the cascade of events that lead to vision. Damage to the photoreceptors, either through degenerative disease or injury, leads to permanent vision impairment or blindness.
David Gamm, director of UW — Madison’s McPherson Eye Research Institute and professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, says that stem cell replacement therapy using lab-grown photoreceptors is a promising strategy to combat retinal disease. The challenge is that stem cell treatments aimed at replacing photoreceptors need to first be tested in animals. Since human cells are not compatible in other species and are quickly rejected when transplanted, it’s difficult to assess their potential.
“Pig and human retinas share many key features, making pigs ideal for modeling human retinal disease and testing ocular therapeutics,” Gamm says. “By testing ‘human-equivalent’ photoreceptors in pigs, we can get a better sense of what these cells can do if they are not immediately attacked by the host animal.”
In a new study published in Stem Cell Reports, the Gamm Lab partnered with researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research to develop lab-grown pig retinal organoids. They found that pig-derived photoreceptors shared many similarities with those made from human retinal organoids.
“This is the first time that people have made pig retinal organoids,” says Kim Edwards, a graduate student in the Gamm Lab and first author of the study. “And this was the first time that people have done a comparison of human versus another species of retinal organoids.”
Organoids are small tissue clusters — about the size of a large pin head — made up of hundreds of thousands of cells, which allow scientists to replicate the cellular interactions and conditions in a human tissue or organ, but in the controlled environment of a lab dish.
A retinal organoid examined at an early stage of differentiation shows different cells visualized by immunocytochemistry (Image courtesy of Kim Edwards)
“The photoreceptor cells within human organoids can respond to light and communicate with each other through synaptic connections,” says Gamm. “To determine whether they can connect inside a damaged retina and restore vision, we need to transplant and test them in pigs.”
Edwards says that to get quality organoids, it’s important to start with quality stem cells. They collaborated with University of Calgary assistant professor Li-Fang “Jack” Chu, formerly a postdoc in Jamie Thomson’s lab at the Morgridge Institute, to obtain the pig pluripotent stem cells.
“Historically, the Thomson Lab has been good at making human induced pluripotent stem cells,” says Ron Stewart, Morgridge investigator in computational biology. “But it turns out that making them for additional species like pig is really challenging. Jack worked it out and is leading the way with his new lab.”
After successfully generating pig induced pluripotent stem cells, the next challenge was to encourage them to differentiate into retinal cells. Edwards began by using the Gamm Lab’s established human organoid protocol to see if it would work using stem cells from pig. The protocol timing was based on the human gestation period of 40 weeks, but they noted a pig’s pregnancy is only about half that length. So, the scientists thought, what if we use the same protocol, but cut the timing in half?
“We were able to make a lot of retinal organoids from that, which was really exciting,” Edwards says. “It’s a good proof of concept to show that if we’re going to differentiate to a specific cell type, we really need to pay attention to the gestational differences and the inherent differences between the cells.”
Using immunocytochemistry techniques, they characterized proteins associated with specific retinal cells present at early-stage versus late-stage development in both pig and human organoid models. To dig deeper, the Gamm Lab collaborated with computational biologist Beth Moore in the Stewart Computational Biology Group at Morgridge to look at gene expression within the cells using single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq).
“They did a lot of magic using single-cell RNA-seq — things that we didn’t even think were possible,” Edwards says.
Image courtesy of Norrie Russell, The Roslin Institute
The organoids are dissociated into individual cells, and each cell is tagged with a barcode and sequenced individually. The data captured is then used to group similar cells together, giving in-depth insight into the nature of all the cell types found in the organoid, including rod and cone photoreceptors and other cell types such as retinal ganglion cells.
“It’s an unbiased and very comprehensive view of what genes are expressed in each cell type in the organoid,” says Moore. “It’s a different type of marker from the immunochemistry. It’s a different way to come to the same conclusion of identifying different cell types.”
Both Edwards and Moore had to overcome challenges to arrive at these conclusions. First, given the nature of organoids, Edwards needed to optimize their protocols to separate the cells and maintain them prior to sequencing.
“They don’t like to be dissociated and put on a dish, especially the photoreceptors,” says Edwards. “We joke that the photoreceptors work better together, just like people.”
On the data analysis side, Moore explains that each cell gets encapsulated in a droplet that contains the barcode for sequencing. But sometimes, one droplet encapsulates multiple cells, or the droplet might be empty and not contain any cell, which introduces errors in the sequencing data.
“That can really mess up your analysis, especially when you are trying to identify different cell types,” Moore says. Moore developed an analysis pipeline to filter out any unwanted sequences and normalize the data. She then mapped the genes expressed in different clusters, which they could map to specific cell types and compare with the immunocytochemistry results.
Another challenge — the significant difference between pig and human genomes — meant Moore also had to work through a list of known genes in both species and match them with the sequences to map out the different cell types.
“Having that confirmatory data from Beth was really critical for us to feel confident about what we were seeing,” Edwards says.
This work was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense in collaboration with the National Eye Institute with the aims of exploring cell replacement therapy to treat retinal injuries that commonly occur in the military. The researchers have begun to do transplants in pigs using photoreceptors from the pig organoids to determine whether they establish connections and make synapses with downstream neurons.
“We’re excited to show that you can grow these retinal organoids from different species and that a lot of groups across the world are starting to make them,” says Edwards. “It all starts from having good stem cells.”
When much of your savings are tied up in the land itself — when, as some have called it, you’re “land rich and cash poor” — how do you fund your retirement, cover medical expenses, and provide for family without simply selling the land to the highest bidder
