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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
‘Hire back park staff’: Visitors feel the pinch of Trump’s
layoffs at National Park Service
By Ella Nilsen, CNN
Updated:
1:59 PM EDT, Thu July 3, 2025
Source: CNN
The visitors who trek to America’s national parks are already
noticing the changes, just months after President Donald Trump took
office.
“I’ve been visiting national parks for 30 years and never has the
presence of rangers been so absent,” one visitor to Zion National
Park wrote in National Park Service public feedback obtained by CNN.
The visitor said they saw just one trail crew at the iconic Utah park.
There were no educational programs offered at any of the five parks
they visited on their trip.
“Hire back park staff. We need them,” the visitor wrote.
At Yosemite, another visitor said there were no rangers at the Hetch
Hetchy reservoir entrance station, preventing visitors from picking up
wilderness permits.
“More staff would be a BIG and IMPORTANT improvement,” that visitor
wrote.
America’s most treasured national parks are getting crunched by
Trump’s government-shrinking layoffs just as the summer travel season
gets into full swing.
Top officials vowed to hire thousands of seasonal employees to pick up
the slack after the Trump administration fired around 1,000 NPS
employees as part of known as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.”
Department of Interior officials said in a February memo they would aim
to hire 7,700 seasonal workers at NPS, and post listings for 9,000
jobs.
But those numbers haven’t materialized ahead July 4th — the
parks’ busiest time of the year. Internal National Park Service data
provided to CNN by the National Parks Conservation Association shows
that about 4,500 seasonal and temporary staff have been hired.
Full-time staff numbers are down, too; as of June, the parks service
had 12,600 full-time employees, which is 24% fewer staff than they had
at the beginning of the year.
That’s the lowest staffing level in over 20 years, according to
Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the
National Parks Conservation Association.
Some parks, including Yellowstone, have increased their staff this
year. But with low staffing levels at other parks unlikely to
meaningfully improve this year, Kym Hall, a former NPS regional
director and park superintendent, told CNN she worries park rangers and
other staff could hit a breaking point later this summer.
“By mid-August, you’re going to have staff that is so burned
out,” Hall said. “Somebody is going to make a mistake, somebody is
going to get hurt. Or you’re going to see visitors engaging with
wildlife in a way that they shouldn’t, because there aren’t enough
people out in the parks to say, ‘do not get that close to a grizzly
bear that’s on the side of the road; that’s a terrible idea.’”
The National Park Service did not respond to CNN’s request for
comment on its staffing levels.
Meanwhile, visitors are arriving in droves. Last year for recreation
visits at nearly 332 million, smashing the previous record set in 2016.
Hall said the process of hiring thousands of seasonal workers for the
summer takes months, typically starting in the previous fall or winter
to fully staff up.
“Even if the parks had permission, and even if they had some funding,
it takes months and months to get a crew of seasonal (workers)
recruited, vetted, hired, boarded into their duty stations, trained and
ready to serve the public by Memorial Day,” Hall said.
Compounding the staffing issue is the fact that many park
superintendents, some of whom oversee the most iconic parks like
Yosemite, have retired or taken the Trump administration’s deferred
resignation offers. That leaves over 100 parks without their chief
supervisor, Brengel said.
And amid the staff losses, staffers normally assigned to park
programming, construction, and trail maintenance, as well as a cadre of
park scientists, have been reassigned to visitor services to keep up
with the summer season.
Questioned by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill about the
low staffing numbers, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has brushed off
concerns, testifying in May that slightly less than half of permanent
NPS employees work on the ground in the parks, while other staff work
at regional offices or at DC headquarters.
“I want more people in the parks,” Burgum said. “I want less
overhead. There’s an opportunity to have more people working in our
parks … and have less people working for the National Park
Service.”
But internal NPS data tells a different story, Brengel said, showing
that around 80% of National Park Service staff work in the parks. And
regional offices play an important supporting staff role, with
scientists on staff to help maintain fragile parks ecosystems, as well
as specialists who monitor geohazard safety issues like landslides.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska recently pressed Burgum to
provide a full list of staff positions that have been cut at the
National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest
Service since the Trump administration took over. The Interior
Department has not provided the list, a Senate staffer said.
The regional offices within the park service are on edge, waiting to
see how courts rule on a Trump administration reduction in force plan
they fear could gut their ranks, a National Park Service employee in a
Western state told CNN.
“If they greenlight the RIF plan, then it’s going to be a
bloodbath,” the employee said.
In addition to probationary workers that were fired in February, early
retirements are also culling the agency’s ranks, and the continued $1
spending limit on federal workers’ credit cards is making it
extremely difficult to do field work in the parks, with a simple
overnight trip needing to be requested 10 days in advance, the employee
added.
The lack of superintendents and NPS supervisors creates more of a
headache, they added.
“These times, when it’s all about fighting for scarce resources,
you really need those upper-level people with clout working the
system,” the employee said.
Hall, the retired NPS regional director, said losing rangers,
maintenance professionals and park superintendents could profoundly
alter American landmarks.
“What you’ve lost with all this attrition – you’ve lost all
this knowledge that’s going to take years to build back up,” Hall
said.
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