Hammered by staffing cuts, Alaska's national parks brace for millions of visitors

USA Today

21-05-2025

Hammered by staffing cuts, Alaska's national parks brace for millions of visitors Staffing cuts at Alaska's national parks will save taxpayer dollars. But also likely to limit land management, visitor experience.
Show Caption
Hide Caption
Fat Bear Week lets people vote on their favorite chubby bear
Katmai National Park and Preserve will once again allow people to vote on their favorite chubby bear during the Fat Bear Week, starting October 4th.
Staffing cuts at the National Park Service in Alaska will mean less oversight of wolves, whales, weather and fast-melting glaciers this summer. The cuts raise questions about the experiences that 3.3 million visitors will have in a state that's home to half of all national park lands as the tourism and cruise-ship season ramps up.
But for now, Fat Bear Week remains safe.
President Donald Trump has been slashing employment across the federal government as he makes good on his campaign promises to shrink bureaucracy and save taxpayer dollars. And Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has given Elon Musk's DOGE team sweeping powers to cut or reallocate spending at the National Park Service in order to prioritize coal, oil and gas development.
Public lands advocates say the cuts imperil important work both on the frontlines and behind the scenes in managing public lands across the country, including in Alaska, which is home to 60% of all land under park service control.
When Trump took office, park service staffing was already 20% lower than in 2010, even though 2024 was the busiest year for park visitation in history, with 332 million visitors.
Now, a first-of-its-kind analysis shows an estimated 60 staffers from the National Park Service's regional offices in Alaska have departed under the Trump administration via firings, layoffs retirements and buyouts. The cuts represent about 33% of the regional staffing across Alaska, which is home to 54 million acres of park service land.
Overall National Park Service staffing changes are not publicly available, in part because the federal government exempted itself from regulations requiring private employers to disclose job-cut data.
Alex Johnson, the campaign director for the National Parks Conservation Association's Arctic and Interior Alaska area said he's worried the cuts will impact the public's experience.
For many Americans, a visit to Alaska via a cruise remains a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Almost 60% of all tourists to Alaska arrive by cruise ship each year, according to state statistics, many of them traveling through Glacier Bay National Park or Kenai Fjords National Park before taking a scenic bus or train ride to Denali National Park.
"There are so many people who dream of coming to Alaska for that national park experience, to see the bears, to see the glaciers, to see the caribou, and essentially at this point the park service doesn't have the resources or expertise to maintain those landscapes," Johnson said.
Impact of staffing cuts
The nonprofit NCPA cross-referenced a list of current employees with last year's directory to help build the list of departed staff. Those approximately 60 departures do not include staffing reductions in the parks themselves, or regional IT or human resources employees whose positions have been centralized to the Interior Department. An Interior Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the staffing reductions.
The regional office departures include wildlife biologists, historians, fire ecologists, tribal liaisons and interpretive specialists. Also gone: the employee responsible for overseeing the service's automated weather monitoring stations, which are heavily used by pilots across Alaska to plot safe flights.
The tally also does not include the current vacancies in the top spots of six Alaska national parks.
In Alaska, the National Park Service manages an area larger than the entire state of Utah ‒ from renowned Denali National Park and Kenai Fjords National Park to the nation's largest national park, the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which alone is nearly the size of West Virginia.
The NCPA estimates that at least 2,5000 park service employees nationwide have left under Trump, in addition to the approximately 1,000 probationary employees who were summarily fired. Congress is currently debating a federal budget plan that could cut up to $1 billion from the National Park Service.
USA TODAY spoke with multiple park service employees in Alaska to confirm the numbers of departures and the impact those job losses are having.
One regional office staffer in Anchorage said they and their colleagues have been backing up all their data and writing down how they do their jobs. That way, said the staffer, who was granted anonymity because they fear for their job, said they want to ensure park service employees some years down the road will be able to understand the previous work. It's equivalent, the worker said, to writing your own will.
Short-term approach 'will have an enormous financial impact on the communities'
Trump has promised to hire a more-than-normal number of seasonal employees to help ensure parks remain open for visitors. But current and former park service staffers who spoke with USA TODAY said those seasonal employees won't be taking on long-term projects like tracking bears or monitoring receding glaciers.
Earlier this month, five former National Park Service directors, along with multiple other former park service leaders, warned that budget cuts risk violating federal law requiring the park service to protect its properties for future generations. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered current park service leaders to shift staffing to preserve visitor experiences, like keeping open visitor centers and campgrounds.
"...We fear that these messages will put NPS superintendents in a difficult situation when confronted with decisions necessary to protect the resources of the units of the National Park System," wrote the former leaders, who served under both Democratic and Republic presidents.
"The crippling of our parks and public lands, and the threat to the future of the National Park System, will have an enormous financial impact on the communities that rely on parks and other public lands that support their economies," they concluded.
One bright spot is Katmai National Park and Preserve, which appears to have largely been spared significant job losses, several park service experts said.
Park officials confirmed to USA TODAY that they will continue running the wildly popular Fat Bear Week competition livestream, which last year drew 10 million viewers.
The livestream webcams at Katmai's Brooks Falls area show brown bears ‒ the correct name for grizzlies living in coastal areas ‒ as they gorge on spawning salmon each fall in preparation for winter hibernation.