“Their allegations against her do not rise to the level of a termination,” Mr. Lieu said, adding that Mrs. Chen had no previous disciplinary record and had in fact received top reviews and awards for her government service. “If she was not a Chinese-American, she would not have been arrested, indicted and would not now be in the process of being fired.”

Last December, federal agents arrested Mrs. Chen and accused her of illegally accessing a federal dam database on behalf of foreign interests in China. However, the investigation found that Mrs. Chen had only shared information from publicly available websites with a former college classmate, now China’s vice water minister, who asked her how reservoir projects are funded in the United States.

In her search to answer his question, Mrs. Chen asked supervisors for relevant data and at one point searched the National Inventory of Dams’ password-protected website, using a password provided by a colleague. Mrs. Chen never found any information relevant to her classmate’s query, but did download information that was relevant to her work forecasting flooding along the Ohio River, which she never used or shared.

Her use of a colleague’s password to download data from a government website became a major component of the government’s espionage case against her, as well as her dismissal.

In a letter repeating many of the earlier charges, Laura K. Furgione, the deputy director of the National Weather Service, wrote that she proposed to fire Mrs. Chen for “conduct demonstrating untrustworthiness,” “misrepresentation,” “misuse of a federal government database” and “lack of candor.” Ms. Furgione did not respond to emailed requests for interviews.

Her letter, which was dated Sept. 4, the Friday before Labor Day, gave Mrs. Chen 15 calendar days to reply.

One of the reasons Ms. Furgione cited for Mrs. Chen’s dismissal was new. She wrote that the government had concluded Mrs. Chen “demonstrated untrustworthiness” because she had “secretly provided internal N.W.S. data to a member of the general public.”