Mass firing hits national parks ahead of busy summer season

By Zoe Sottile and Graham Hurley, CNN

(CNN) — Shorter hours. Longer lines. And no more guided tours.

Visitors to America’s national parks can expect some of those impacts after the Trump administration fired 1,000 park employees as part of its latest effort to dramatically reduce the federal workforce.

The cuts come as hundreds of national parks, which serve more than 325 million visitors annually, are gearing up for the summer — typically their busiest season.

National parks were already short-staffed, with parks operating with 20% fewer staff than 2010, according to Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.

“There was no fat to trim,” she said. “All the staff who were there were needed.”

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado announced on Facebook it would be closed Mondays and Tuesdays due to “a lack of staffing,” and visitors to Utah’s Zion National Park faced a lengthy backup of cars, with only one or two workers managing the entry booths, according to CNN affiliate KSTU.

Overall, 1,000 National Park Service employees were fired, independent Sen. Angus King’s office confirmed to CNN. At least 50 of those jobs were restored last week, according to The Associated Press.

The Department of the Interior – which runs the NPS – eliminated 2,300 positions, according to a fact sheet from Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington.

The NPS and the Department of the Interior did not respond to requests for comment from CNN.

Trash and graffiti

Experts say that the firings, announced on February 14, could affect many facets of visitors’ experiences at the over 400 national parks in the US.

The Covid-19 pandemic set some precedent for what tourists might expect with less staff, according to Beth Pratt, the California Director for the National Wildlife Federation, who has worked extensively in Yosemite and Yellowstone.

Many parks were closed during the pandemic, and didn’t have the staff to manage people who were still visiting, Pratt said.

“People were cutting down Joshua trees, they were driving in sensitive meadows, trash was everywhere, graffiti,” she told CNN Monday.

Parks, she said, require a lot of staff to ensure “people don’t use them inappropriately.” With the staff shortage, park managers may have to make changes like closing certain trails or campgrounds, Pratt said.

Yosemite National Park has paused sales for reservations at five campgrounds, saying it hoped to reopen sales “as soon as possible” in a post on Facebook.

Several sites, including larger parks and smaller attractions, have already slashed their public hours. The Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa announced it would now close on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Firing staff could mean parks face “maintenance issues going into their busy season,” said Brengel.

“It might mean that the vehicles in the park don’t get fixed quickly enough. It could mean that a trail doesn’t get repaired fast enough,” she said. “It could mean roads that have potholes or problems after a winter snow don’t get repaired as quickly.”

Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico announced it had canceled guided tours and that self-guided tours would be available an hour later than usual starting March 23.

The NPS has said it will hire up to 7,700 seasonal positions this year – more than the 6,350 typically hired, according to The Associated Press — reversing a hiring freeze on seasonal parks employees President Donald Trump announced in January.

But the seasonal positions won’t make up for fired permanent employees, according to Brengel.

Many of the seasonal jobs are entry-level, whereas some fired employees were managers or other employees with “more responsibility,” she said.

“You really can’t have the seasonals without the other full-time staff people who are helping to manage them and make sure they have the right instructions on what to do,” Brengel said.

In Alaska’s Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which spans over 14 million acres, the only pilot was fired, according to Bill Wade, the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers.

“Now how do they protect the wildlife and detect poaching activities, or find somebody that’s overdue in the park or climbers in distress and so forth?” he asked.

Losing a ‘dream job’

Wade told CNN he’d heard “anger and disappointment and rage” from fired employees.

For a large number of the employees, working at the NPS was a “dream job,” said Wade. Park rangers are usually motivated by passion more than financial gain, he added.

“We used to say that, you know, in the Park Service you get paid in sunsets,” said Wade.

Olek Chmura, a former maintenance worker at Yosemite National Park, told CNN “there were a lot of tears” when he unexpectedly received an email telling him he was fired.

His job wasn’t glamorous: He cleaned toilets and picked up dirty diapers from trails, he said. But he was passionate about the work, saying he chose to work for the park instead of taking higher-paid jobs as a plumber because of his passion for preserving America’s “natural beauty.”

Chmura called the firing “traumatic,” and said he plans to continue speaking out against the cuts.

Many of the fired employees, Brengel said, received emails saying their termination was due to “low performance” – in contrast with the employees’ high performance records.

“We’re actually losing Park Service staff with institutional knowledge,” she said, calling the cuts “indiscriminate.”

Andria Townsend, who worked at Yosemite National Park as a specialist on carnivore species, told CNN affiliate KFSN she was fired while working overtime. She said she had no time to clean out her office or reach out to colleagues.

“It made me really angry,” Townsend said. “I work really hard at my job. I have two degrees … and to be told that I’m not meeting the standards of my job – it’s a complete lie.”

Anger over the cuts has prompted protests. On February 22, staffers at Yosemite National Park hung an upside-down American flag on the side of El Capitan, a world-famous rock climbing destination in the park.

“The purpose of this exercise of free speech is to disrupt without violence and draw attention to the fact that public lands in the United States are under attack,” said the group of demonstrators in a statement, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

And dozens of people gathered in Zion National Park on Sunday to protest the cuts, according to social media posts of the event.

Wade said he hoped the government would reverse the cuts and restore the fired employees – and urged concerned citizens to make their voices heard.

“It’s clear that the people of this country really love their national parks,” said Wade. “And now it’s time for them to do something about it.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the status of self-guided tours at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which are still available.

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CNN’s Andy Rose contributed to this report.