How the Trump and DOGE cuts could ruin National Parks this summer

[ResidentialBusiness]

Before he lost his job in a mass firing by the Trump administration last Friday, Nate Vince was the only locksmith for the hundreds of buildings and millions of visitors at Yosemite National Park.

“Imagine a city-size place with one locksmith to all those people,” Vince says. “When there’s a car accident and an emergency medical person can’t get into a vehicle, or can’t get into their supplies they need, they would call me.” Now, with the nearest cities hours away, there’s no one who can easily do the same work.

He says a coworker who was also fired was the park’s only HVAC technician, handling heating and cooling for every building in the park. At a nearby national monument, he says a friend who was a park ranger was fired despite the fact that he was that park’s only EMT—a first responder who has saved lives.

“This is flat-out reckless,” the park ranger, Alex Wild, wrote on Instagram after the elimination of his job. Wild had always had good performance reviews. But like other workers who were fired, he got a form email saying that he had “failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment.”

A National Park Service employee is seen as photographers flock to take photos of Firefall at Horsetail Fall in Yosemite National Park, California, United States on February 19, 2025. [Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty Images]

Rethink your vacation plans

In Southern California, a worker at a national forest who was fired said that part of their job involved preventing wildfires. “My crew is responsible for so much prevention and post-wildfire cleanup, and at this point it’s almost a guarantee that this forest will have some sort of major wildfire, as it has for the last few years,” the former employee said off the record.

Across the country, around 1,000 National Park Service employees were fired on February 14, from staff who run ticket booths to janitors. Another 3,400 workers were fired from the Forest Service. Hundreds of other employees chose to accept the government’s (likely illegal, and unfunded) offer to resign from their job and still get paid for months.

The net effect: If you’re planning a vacation to a national park or public lands this spring or summer, the experience might be very different than it was in the past. Bathrooms might be closed or overflowing with trash because there aren’t enough workers to clean them. Trails might fall into disrepair. Some smaller parks may have to shut down entirely. And ecosystems are likely to suffer.

Visitors are already seeing changes now. Last weekend, if you tried to go Franklin Falls, part of a national forest in Washington, you would have seen a barricade on the road and a sign saying that the trailhead was closed “due to the large-scale termination of Forest Service employees.” If you tried to visit the Grand Canyon, you would have waited twice as long as usual at the entrance.

Cuts on top of cuts

The cuts compound challenges that parks had after years of inadequate funding. “Our parks were already stretched thin,” says John Gardner, senior director on budget and appropriations at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. Since 2010, he says, staffing in national parks has dropped by 20%, while the number of visitors grew by an average of 16%. (The situation is worse in some parks, like Zion, which has twice as many visitors no additional staff.)

Now, Gardner says, “there are positions across the board—from maintenance to resource care to interpretation that have been lost. And that threatens the protection of cultural and natural resources as well as the visiting experience.”

Work behind the scenes to manage forests and other ecosystems will suffer. “We’re not the people you see out on the trails leading walks, but we’re the reason that the resources are there for visitors to enjoy,” says Angela Moxley, a botanist who was just fired from her job restoring habitats and studying endangered species at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia.

“One of the things I still can’t wrap my head around is that I just had to walk away from all of these projects I was working on,” she says. “There was no time to make any sort of plans to hand over the work or discuss any of it. And there aren’t going to be enough people left anyway to take over the project, anyway.”

In November and December, for example, she sowed seeds into wetlands, and had planned to go out next month to see which plants had germinated and determine the next steps to take. “Now I’ll never know,” she says.

Like other workers who were fired on Valentine’s Day, she was in a probationary period—she had been in her current role for just under a year, meaning that she didn’t have the same job protections as staff with more tenure. She also got the same email as others, blaming her performance for the firing, despite excellent performance reviews.

When Trump took office in January, seasonal Park Service employees also had their job offers rescinded. After pressure, the Department of the Interior said last week that it would reinstate 5,000 of those employees. But Gardner says that it’s an open question how quickly those positions can be filled now; some workers have moved on, and others will question whether they really want the jobs.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of people wary of applying, and they’re going to consider other opportunities,” says Gerry Seavo James, a deputy campaign director at the Sierra Club. At some parks where the number of visitors peaks in the spring, onboarding for seasonal visitors typically would have started now. The delays mean that parks likely could be critically understaffed.

Trash piles up on the National Mall, which is overseen by the National Park Service, during the 2018 shutdown. [Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images]

What will the parks be like?

Visitors may have negative experiences, and parks could see serious damage. During the first Trump administration, when a government shutdown in 2018 closed national parks, Joshua Tree National Park was devastated. “People drove around the gates, drove through the desert off-road, and camped in areas that weren’t allowed for camping, including an area that is important for a Native American tribe,” says Curt Sauer, a former superintendent at Joshua Tree. “The trash was immeasurable, and the human defecation around the restrooms, which were closed.” Some of the park’s unique trees were cut down; illegal campfires damaged other parts of the fragile ecosystem.

Closed bathrooms in Yosemite National Park, 2018. [Photo: Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images]

Slashing jobs at the Park Service and Forest Service—none of which were particularly well-paid—isn’t going to save the government much money. (In fact, hiring outside workers to do the same jobs will probably cost more: Nate Vince notes that he was paid around a third of what he would have made as a locksmith in the “real world.”) Seasonal workers typically earn around $15–19 an hour, and in some cases, that’s covered by visitor fees, not the federal budget. The total budget for the Park Service is less than one-fifteenth of one percent of the federal budget.

“There’s nothing efficient in culling the ranks of the Park Service workforce,” says Gardner. “It’s reckless, and it undermines an important economic driver.” Every dollar invested in national parks, he says, returns around $15 in economic activity in nearby communities.

A view of Golden Gate Bridge and Presidio as seen from Twin Peaks in San Francisco, 2023. [Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty Images]

The destruction is the point

If saving money isn’t the goal, it’s possible that deliberate destruction is. When parks and public lands can’t function properly, “that, in turn, is going to lead to frustrations by the public, which will just further bolster the argument that these federal land agencies are incapable of doing their jobs, and that the land would be better served by putting them in state or private hands,” says Neal Clark, the wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a nonprofit that works to protect public lands.

The author of Project 2025’s section about the Department of the Interior, William Perry Pendley, has argued in the past that public lands in the West should be privatized. Project 2025 talks about reducing national monuments and environmental protections, and increasing drilling for oil and gas. Trump has talked about building “freedom cities” on public lands. In an executive order on February 19, Trump said he was eliminating the Presidio Trust, which manages the 1,500-acre Presidio National Park in San Francisco; some Trump supporters have suggested that the park should be developed into housing.

“I think it’s important to remember the entire public land system is a response to corporate greed and exploitation of what were shared resources,” says Clark. “We’re hearing the same arguments today that were made 100 years ago, and they’re coming from essentially 21st-century robber barons. This is about corporate greed.”

Still, national parks and public lands are broadly popular—and some past attempts to change them have failed. (Reagan, for example, wanted to auction off public lands to help with the deficit, but that didn’t happen.) Public pressure on Congress can help, says Gardner. “The most important thing that people can do is reach out to their elected members of Congress,” he says. If you have time, make an extra call to the representatives for districts with parks like Yellowstone, he says—and tell them that you won’t be bringing your tourist dollars unless parks have the staff they need to run properly.

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