Can the National Park Service thrive under Trump administration cuts?

Yahoo

18-07-2025

When Sue Fritzke was the superintendent of Capitol Reef National Park, her employees performed additional duties beyond their job description. In the years that she managed the park from 2018 through 2023, workers said they were stretched thin, requiring cross-team work.
Fritzke said this multitasking of additional responsibilities was called 'collateral duty.'
'You had people that were a park ranger and 'collateral duty EMT,' 'collateral duty firefighter,' 'collateral duty everything-else-that-you could-possibly-think-of,' even search and rescue,' Fritzke said.
When something came up, everyone chipped in. The people paving the roads would help with wildfires, while educators or rangers at the welcome center would help with medical emergencies.
Eight members of her team got EMT certified, just because it was helpful for the range of responsibilities required within the park. The employees were paid to do the additional 'voluntary' hours of work, Fritzke said, but it wasn't really voluntary. It also competed with the jobs each was hired to do.
'You're stretching the ability of those staff with all of that collateral duty … because, ultimately, they need to be focused on their core duties, whether it's law enforcement, fire management, protecting the park's resources or educating the public about a particular park,' Fritzke said.
'All of a sudden now, you just don't have that depth of staffing to be able to do that.'
Fritzke was referring to staffing cuts made to the National Park Service earlier this year by the Trump administration and executed by the Department of Government Efficiency team in a broader effort to shrink the federal work force. Probationary employees were laid off, hiring was frozen and — according to former NPS employees, conservation advocates and multiple national outlets including Politico — some staffers took a given option to retire early as others left voluntarily.
What is the total workforce reduction?
That remains unclear, due to a Department of the Interior policy that prevents anyone at the agency from discussing staffing levels. No one is allowed or willing to publicly discuss park staff at all.
Generally, questions from the Deseret News were met with defensive responses from staffers who declined to comment, highlighted that their particular park's services were fully operable or redirected the query to a different office. Grand Teton National Park, however, did confirm that their staffing numbers remained the same from 2024 to 2025.
Across multiple requests, the answer from the individual parks, the national communications team, straight through to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's public affairs team was essentially the same: 'It is department policy that we don't comment on personnel.'
The National Parks Conservation Association, a conservation advocacy group, pulled data from the Department of the Interior's workforce database and published a report July 3 that found that since January the National Park Service has lost 24% of its permanent staff.
It also found that, of the 8,000 seasonal staff that Burgum pledged to hire this year, 4,500 were brought on. Within the 433 'individual park units' and 63 national parks that represent an area larger than 85 million acres that the Park Service manages, it employs just over 20,000 people. Those seasonal employees are a large percentage of the overall team.
'It's critical that the public understands that these staffing losses are not just deep, but they're also incredibly indiscriminate,' said John Garder, the senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association.
He said it found that archaeologists, historians, wildlife experts, air- and water-quality experts, but also more than 100 superintendents — think of these like park CEOs — have left the service this year.
'We're concerned about not just what it looks like this summer — the challenge is far greater than that — but about what this means for the long-term capacity for the park service to meet its basic mandate to ensure the protection of these incredible natural, historic, scenic and recreational resources,' Garder said.
'So, front-facing to the public, it looks like everything is fine. Everything's not fine. There are people who are cleaning toilets, who really need to be going out and collecting data about what's going on with resources.'
Sue Fritzke, former superentendant of Capitol Reef National Park
Neither the National Park Service nor the Department of the Interior would confirm or comment on those staffing numbers, which could not be independently verified by the Deseret News.
One long-tenured National Park Service employee from a well-known park in the Intermountain West spoke under condition of anonymity. The person said the cuts 'vary tremendously from park to park, unit to unit,' making it difficult to draw broad conclusions about how the parks are doing. That person added that for their park, at least, 'overall things are pretty normal this year.'
Will the parks be improved?
No parks have been permanently closed or lost conservation protections this summer. And, while some have had to alter hours of operation, the institutions are open, even if at lower — or more 'efficient' — staffing levels.
The same day that the National Parks Conservation Association report was published in early July, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled 'Making America Beautiful Again by Improving Our National Parks.' The order stipulates the administration will preserve opportunities for American families to make great memories in national parks 'by increasing entry fees for foreign tourists, improving affordability for United States residents and expanding opportunities to enjoy America's splendid national treasures.'
The order is primarily focused on revenue generation, but it also addresses the lingering issue of deferred maintenance that the parks have navigated for years.
Billions of dollars in maintenance projects have been left unaddressed due to decades of limited budgets — across administrations of both political parties — within the park system. Trump's order requires the Interior secretary to 'take all appropriate action to fully implement the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund established in the Great American Outdoors Act.'
That action alone will release $1.3 billion a year for the next five years for the park service to tackle lingering issues.
More broadly than this one agency, among Trump's campaign promises was one to reduce the federal work force.
Culling employees from massive governmental bureaucracies — in 2024, the NPS had more than 20,000 permanent staff and over 138,000 volunteers — is considered one way to rein in federal spending, another key promise of Trump's presidential campaign. The effort to limit government spending was the reason Trump created DOGE in the first place.
It was DOGE that, in February, cut the first 1,000 employees from the National Park Service as part of that larger effort to slim down the federal government. The Department of the Interior offered 'deferred retirements' (buyouts) which many took. Some were exempted from the offer, according to the Associated Press. Those were wildland firefighters, law enforcement officers, those in aviation jobs and cyber security positions, but it applied to all other positions within the park from custodians, rangers and scientists to historians managing the second-largest archaeological collection in the U.S.
By May, the conservation association determined that the National Park Service had lost 16% of its personnel. Then came the July assessment, which increased the figure to 24%. In those months, some of the park employees who were fired had been rehired, but who and how many were permanently let go remains unclear.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed on July 4 removes $267 million of funding committed to the park service. It was far less than the $900 million originally suggested by the Trump administration, now representing 8% of its budget.
'It is department policy that we don't comment on personnel.'
Secretary Doug Burgum's Public Affair's office
Were the parks overstaffed?
Phil Francis was part of a National Park Service restructuring and staff reduction that took place in the early 1990s. The regional office where he worked in Santa Fe was closed, but that was far from the end of his time in the national park system. He found another position within the service and his career wound up spanning more than 40 years, until his 2013 retirement. He spent the last several years as the deputy and acting superintendent of Great Smokey Mountain National Park.
Francis is now board chair for the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, a group of former national park employees who leverage their experience to advocate for the park service (Sue Fritzke is also a board member).
'I actually have experienced a reduction in force,' he said. 'Although I think today is even worse.'
That's because he watched staffing numbers and budgets decline over the years while park visitation steadily increased.
In the 1990s, 'most of us felt the budgets were too small to handle the responsibilities that we were given and given to serve the public,' Francis said. 'So every year, every budget was passed, we saw small reductions. But cumulatively, those reductions became pretty huge.'
In the early 1990s, the parks had between 255 million and 274 million visitors a year. Last year, the parks had their largest number of visitors ever with 331 million people. Yellowstone National Park just recorded its busiest May ever.
From Francis's perspective, the National Park Service begins each year in a 'huge deficit' because of dollars not allocated the year before (the deferred maintenance issue). Since the start of his career, 'we've continued to see deficits as enlarging. So given where we are today — where the idea is to cut the National Park Service employees by some 30% or so — that's on top of having to absorb the costs of the past.'
NPCA's Garder said staffing requirements had steadily eroded since 2010, under a Democratic administration. 'The workforce capacity fell by over a fifth in the last 10 years,' Garder said.
The 'collateral duty' Fritzke described is rather ubiquitous and far-reaching, Garder said.
'You have archaeologists who are cleaning bathrooms because they lost their janitorial staff. You've got law enforcement officers who are parking cars because they've lost their visitor services people,' Garder said. 'People who are working two, sometimes even three jobs, because the parks didn't have the funding to hire the colleagues that they used to have.'
According to Garder, it means park employees are all working in visitor-facing roles to keep up the facade that the parks are not experiencing any impact from staffing or budget cuts.
What is the National Park Service's mandate?
The first national park was Yellowstone, founded in 1872, but it was not until 1916 that the National Park Service was officially formed. The Organic Act of 1916 — which was cosponsored by Utah Sen. Reed Smoot — gave the NPS the mandate 'to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.'
That 'unimpaired mandate' is something national park employees reference as a guiding principle. It requires that parks or historical sites must be conserved and maintained for future generations, and that through that conservation, they provide enjoyment for Americans.
But in the midst of the staffing and budget cuts this year, Burgum signed a secretarial order on April 3 titled, 'Ensuring National Parks Are Open and Accessible.' The order makes it clear that parks are to prioritize being available to visitors, stipulating that any park closure or change of operational hours would require director-level review.
It sent the parks scrambling to make sure visitor-facing elements were fully operational and staffed. Even if that meant back-office personnel whose jobs were to support visitor services and maintain conservation efforts were not doing their primary roles.
'National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst,' said Wallace Stegner, the late novelist and conservationist.
We may not know exactly what the job-related stress points are at the national parks, but, according to Fritzke, it is a good time to emphasize gratitude toward national park employees.
'People need to be patient because I think the morale of the National Park Service has never been great, but now it is in the toilet,' she said. 'People just need to say thank you because right now they are not being thanked by the administration.'
That long-tenured employee did have something else to say. 'Parks employees are doing the best they can. They are stressed but they are committed to doing what they do.'
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