Beneath Yosemite's Beauty, Anger and Anxiety Over Trump's Job Cuts

New York Times

01-03-2025

Some might call Elliot Lozano, a 37-year-old biological science technician and weasel specialist, a prime example of why the Trump administration chose to cut 1,000 jobs from the National Park Service.
Others might call him a symbol of the Park Service's purpose, and a reason employees at Yosemite unfurled an upside-down American flag across the granite face of the landmark monolith El Capitan last week.
Mr. Lozano, who worked at Yosemite National Park, was awarded a $5,000 bonus last year for extraordinary efforts to save one endangered weasel — a baby southern Sierra Nevada fisher found orphaned in the park by his team. He was among roughly 10 Yosemite workers who were told by email on Feb. 14 that they would be fired because their 'subject matter knowledge, skills and abilities' were unnecessary. At least 30 other vacancies sit unfilled because of a hiring freeze.
'It does feel like I'm spending my life force trying to solve an important problem,' Mr. Lozano said, still speaking in present tense about his former job.
Lately, there have been few visible signs of the job cuts at Yosemite, a Rhode Island-size national park founded 134 years ago in central California's Sierra Nevada Mountains that Ansel Adams once called 'a glitter of green and golden wonder.' The upside-down flag was taken down. The peak tourist season in the summer is many months away. Climbers are still gathering in the meadows in the thin morning light, peering through binoculars at the specks of their friends up on the big wall as the sun hits the face of El Capitan.
But the Trump administration's radical reshaping of American government has been playing out in this wonderland of wilderness and waterfalls, too. It just does so beneath the surface, where the tensions between cost-cutting and maintaining a piece of America's majestic heritage have been building.
Fired federal workers say they are planning to join protests on Saturday at national parks across the country for a 'Nationwide Day of Action.' Officials at the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, say the reductions will have little impact on visitors' experiences, a claim some experts dispute. Tourists said they did not understand why the parks, of all government services, had to be cut.
Supporters of Yosemite, the country's third-oldest national park, see it as a model of the sort of bureaucratic leanness that President Trump and his advisers say they prize. Taxpayers spent about $32 million last year to keep Yosemite running, but roughly $60 million in other expenses were shouldered, wholly or in part, by volunteers and nonprofit groups that finance conservation and scientific work on public lands.
Last year, that money paid for roughly 400 permanent federal workers and another 345 seasonal ones. They tended the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, which feeds water to the San Francisco Bay Area; maintained trails; fought fires; lectured to students on field trips; and repaired countless locks on dwellings and storage areas. There is a branch of the U.S. District Court at Yosemite (even traffic tickets are a federal matter on park property). There is a medical clinic and a search-and-rescue cadre with a helicopter.
'No one would argue that it is illegitimate to look at staffing levels throughout the government,' said Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent and the co-chair of a Senate subcommittee overseeing national parks. But, he added, 'the idea of this kind of wholesale layoff is just an insult to the people of the United States.'
The Trump administration clearly believes otherwise. At a conservative political conference last month, Elon Musk, the billionaire tapped by Mr. Trump to ferret out federal waste, waved a chain saw at the audience to dramatize his plans for the federal bureaucracy.
'We are focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks,' a spokesperson for the Interior Department said in a statement, adding that the Park Service 'is working closely with the Office of Personnel Management to ensure we are prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people.'
The bulk of the four million people who visit Yosemite annually stay within a seven-square-mile area of waterfalls and sheer cliffs, including Half Dome, a summit that's three times as tall as the Empire State Building. The remaining 1,180 square miles are mostly wilderness, habitat for seasoned climbers, hikers and wildlife.
Workers at Yosemite and other parks have a wide-reaching impact. The helicopter rescue crew at Yosemite sets benchmarks for other aerial rescuers and is deployed far from the park. Park firefighters are part of a national network of trained experts who battle wildfires for state and county governments, and they pitch in at their parks to haul goods and assist incapacitated people in remote areas. Rangers drop their law enforcement duties to lead rescues. Air quality specialists monitor acid rain, which influences the overall health of parks and rivers.
The number of vacancies in Yosemite — the roughly 10 dismissals and the 30-plus unfilled jobs from the hiring freeze, out of hundreds of positions — 'may not seem dramatic,' said Robin Wills, who headed the Park Service's fire and aviation operations in the West until he retired in 2022. 'But each one of those positions fills some critical function that makes the park continue to operate.'
Critical need does not often translate to high pay. Mr. Lozano, the biological science technician, said he had been making less than $22 an hour before losing his job. Olek Chmura, 28, turned down a better-paying job as a plumber to clean latrines and scavenge beer bottles across 9,000 acres of campgrounds and trailheads in Yosemite. He made under $23 an hour as a custodian.
'Scraping excrement off toilets, squeegeeing urine out of bathrooms, picking diapers off the side of the road,' Mr. Chmura said of his job. 'You'd really be surprised at the mess people make.'
Mr. Musk's cost-cutting effort, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, deemed Mr. Chmura's skills and abilities unnecessary and fired him last week. That move left open the question of who will pick up the full truckbed of trash he said he collected daily during the high season.
Employees worry that the firings — paired with a separate temporary freeze this winter on the hiring of hundreds of seasonal workers — spell chaos for the increasingly crowded spring season as well as summer.
The Park Service has said it intends to hire even more summer workers this year than usual, presumably making up for the hiring delay in the winter. But former park officials say that freeze upended hiring at a critical moment, leading applicants to take other jobs and throwing a wrench into tight schedules for training and housing new hires.
Mr. Wills, the retired Park Service executive, said he feared a shortage of firefighters just as California wildfires are becoming both bigger and more frequent. Other experts fretted about the prospect of summertime traffic jams, noting that Yosemite is weeks late in gearing up a transportation management plan and a campground reservation system for midsummer visits.
Workers in Yosemite said they saw no rationale in the selection of those who were fired last month. They said they feared that the move was the opening salvo of a deeper gutting of the federal work force, as emails circulating in several agencies suggest.
'It feels like they took a list of people and did a random number generator and were like, 'You're fired,' 'You're fired,'' said one probationary Yosemite worker who remains employed and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person feared retaliation for speaking to a reporter.
The loss of people on probation — the typically yearlong trial for new hires but also for career workers who take another job to move up the ladder — was particularly excruciating, workers said. In the Park Service, people often spend years cycling through precarious seasonal and temporary positions in the hope of someday securing a long-term role. Probation is the glide path to a permanent job.
Mr. Lozano, the fisher specialist, was but one example. He had worked nearly a decade in Yosemite, but had only been on the federal payroll since 2021. To win a spot on the crew studying the southern Sierra Nevada fisher, with the chance that it could lead to a permanent job, he worked without pay for nearly a year.
'The reality of probation is years of sacrifice, years of unstable jobs, to get the opportunity at having a stable position,' he said.
Fewer than 500 southern Sierra Nevada fishers are believed to exist in and near Yosemite. In his last job, Mr. Lozano hauled traps into the icy backcountry and probed dead trees to uncover fisher dens. His team obtained special protection for dens it identified, boosting survival rates for the endangered weasel.
When his team found the orphaned baby fisher last year, Mr. Lozano took charge of its care, moving into a room at the nearby Fresno Chaffee Zoo, where it was kept. He called the infant weasel Champ. Nursing Champ back to health was a seven-day-a-week job during which, he said, he rarely slept more than 45 minutes or an hour at a stretch. He was prescribed anxiety medication for the stress. Sleep deprivation drove him to two therapists.
'Obviously, I'm not raising a child,' Mr. Lozano said. Still, he added, he felt that in caring for Champ he had learned what it was like to be a parent, 'at least on an emotional level.'
Andria Townsend, 36, a supervisory carnivore specialist who worked on the fisher team, lost her job as well. 'My husband doesn't have a degree,' she said. 'He's a line cook. We've always lived like paycheck to paycheck. He's supported me through undergrad and grad school so that we could maybe eventually live a stable life.'
Both Mr. Lozano and Ms. Townsend received excellent performance reviews. If they were dismissed in the name of more efficient governance, there's one problem with that. The firings, it turns out, did not appear to save the National Park Service any money.
Documents show that Mr. Lozano's and Ms. Townsend's salaries were largely paid by Yosemite Conserva​​ncy, one of the many nonprofit groups that assist parks nationwide. Officials at the Conservancy did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Lozano's work with Champ ultimately paid off. The weasel not only survived, but grew healthy enough to re-enter the wilderness. Champ is the first known southern Sierra Nevada fisher raised from infancy alone in captivity to make it back into the wild.