A series of staffing crises are squeezing a national park workforce that was already spread thin through years of underfunding. Now, a new reduction in force could put even more pressure on employees as we head into the busy spring and summer seasons.
Multiple staffing crises are harming the National Park Service, including mass layoffs, a hiring freeze, forced retirements and delays in onboarding seasonal employees — and a new reduction in force could be imminent. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced plans late last Friday to drastically consolidate land management agencies across the country, and a new round of terminations could affect every level of park management.
These reckless, wide-ranging job cuts come at a time when national parks are more popular than ever. How are parks — and people — coping under these ongoing employee upheavals?
This episode, host Jennifer Errick speaks with John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriation at the National Parks Conservation Association, and Cassidy Jones, former park ranger and visitation program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, on how job cuts and insecurity are harming parks and morale, some of the long-term consequences for resource protection, and what people can do to support park staff.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 42, Squeezed Thin: Park Staff in Upheaval, was produced by Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to Angela Gonzalez, Cory MacNulty and Abbey Robertson.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Read Cassidy Jones’ recent blog story on how to prepare to visit understaffed parks at npca.org/prepare
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org, including one of Cassidy’s favorite winter adventures in episode 15, The Little Jewel Box.
Remember, NPCA’s silent auction is live until April 28, and you can bid on your own podcast-style audio story, for you and about you, as well as many other cool experiences and keepsakes, at npca.org/auction
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org.
Episode 42
Squeezed Thin: Park Staff in Upheaval
Jennifer Errick: The National Park Service has been understaffed, overworked and underfunded for years. Now, a series of executive actions is squeezing a workforce already spread thin, with a new reduction in force on the horizon. What could happen to these dedicated park employees as we head into the busy spring and summer seasons — and what can we do about it?
I’m Jennifer Errick, and this is the Secret Lives of Parks.
[Break]
"It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that's a lie.”
Those are the words of U.S. District Judge William Alsup. Last month, he ordered six federal agencies to reinstate workers who had been indiscriminately fired by the Trump administration in February, including more than a thousand employees of the National Park Service. These workers were in the probationary period of their employment, making them easier targets to let go. On April 8, the Supreme Court paused Judge Alsup’s order, allowing the administration to proceed with the firings. The high court did not rule on the merits of the case, however, and these firings are still under ongoing litigation.
This mass layoff is one of multiple staffing crises currently harming the long-term health of the National Park Service. And a new reduction in force could be imminent. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced plans late last Friday to drastically consolidate land management agencies across the country, and a new round of terminations is expected to affect every level of park management.
These reckless, wide-ranging job cuts come at a time when national parks are more popular than ever. Last month, the Park Service quietly released its annual visitation statistics, and 2024 was the agency’s busiest year ever, with nearly 332 million recreational visits to national park sites.
How are parks — and people — coping under these ongoing employee upheavals? Today, we’re going to talk with two experts on these issues, starting with my colleague, John Garder, who, as senior director of budget and appropriation at NPCA, has been following federal staffing trends at national parks for nearly 15 years.
John Garder: On and after January 20th, we started seeing an alarming series of executive orders and other directives from the administration undermining federal employees, including the dedicated people of the National Park Service. Among the initial things was a buyout-slash-early-retirement offer, also known as the “fork in the road,” which really created a situation where there were a lot of employees, dedicated employees, who were worried about their jobs, who could see kind of the writing on the wall that this was going to be a really tough landscape. And so, they resigned or retired early, really under duress. There were so many people that just felt like there was so much uncertainty that it would just be better to leave the Park Service. A lot of these directives have come down from the administration without the ability for Park Service managers, for the leadership in the Washington office, to even have a say, it was such a top-down process that managers were caught off guard.
Jennifer Errick: Right. And some of this was happening before there was even a secretary of the Interior in place. That did not come from the Department of the Interior or the USDA, in the case of the Forest Service or, you know, at the agency level.
John Garder: That's exactly right. Some of these from acting directors of the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, directed presumably by the White House and/or DOGE.
Jennifer Errick: About how many Park Service employees took that fork in the road, as best we know?
John Garder: About 700.
Jennifer Errick: And then on February 14th, after the Park Service had already lost these 700 employees, then there was also this order to fire all of the agency’s probationary employees, which was over 1,000 employees, correct?
John Garder: That's right. And we kind of knew it was coming because there had been, early on, memos that said managers, identify your employees on a probationary period and send that up the chain, so that presumably DOGE will have that information and have basically a database of all the probationary employees. So, the writing was sort of on the wall, and people were definitely worried about their jobs. We just didn't know what day or when exactly it would come, and if they would have a process that would be more selective or if they would just do it writ large. And of course they chose the most damaging, reckless and indiscriminate way of doing that.
Jennifer Errick: And what was the way?
John Garder: It was telling all probationary employees that they were no longer welcome to work at the National Park Service due to poor performance, even though there hadn't been poor performance. There are also people who had been seasonal employees for years and had just gotten their first full-time positions. They too were probationary. And then people who worked with the service for years, if not decades, who had just gotten a promotion or some kind of lateral move, and they were also probationary and identified for being dismissed, irrespective of how long they've been at the agency or how they're performing.
Jennifer Errick: And what were some of the immediate effects that you saw?
John Garder: This really affected parks throughout the country. Large parks, medium-sized parks, small parks. And the impact, especially in combination with the hiring freeze and how many people took the buyout offer under duress, had a different impact and looked differently depending on each park. We know that for every park that was affected, it had a significant impact on their operations, certainly the morale of the people that continue to work for those parks, and ranged from getting rid of wastewater treatment operators, who are critical to the operation of these facilities at the larger parks, to interpreters to public safety, the scientists, archaeologists, the range of employees.
Jennifer Errick: I really appreciate you listing out some of the specific roles that parks are losing.
John Garder: It's important to also note that the Park Service was significantly understaffed prior to January 20th. Between 2010 and 2023, the Park Service lost 20% of their staff who operate national parks. So already, we saw staff who were doing multiple duties, two sometimes even three jobs at a time. A lot of work wasn't getting done. And it really impacted morale. You combine the hiring freeze and some of these other actions like the fork in the road, there are even fewer people, and now we're looking at a situation where there are all of these Park Service employees who are wondering if they're going to now have to do four or five people's jobs and what's not going to get done, which is of course terrible for morale. They've lost friends at the agency, and they're still wondering what their future looks like as well.
Jennifer Errick: Why was there a 20% erosion in the Park Service staff over that period of years, before all of this happened?
John Garder: Congress has not been providing enough money. There have been a couple of years of cuts, including recently, which is really disappointing and concerning. But the congressional increases, in general, were too small to cover the overhead cost. The Park Service is a very personnel heavy agency. And so, they have a lot of uncontrollable, what they call fixed costs. So, these are cost of living adjustments, increases in insurance rates, retirement benefit increases, all of those and other fixed costs really add up so that superintendents have overhead that they need to cover. So, they're forced to leave positions vacant and over time continue to lose more and more staff.
Jennifer Errick: So, there's been this erosion. One in five staff are just no longer there from where they were historically, 10, 15 years ago. Then on then on top of that, before this immediate crisis, with the fork in the road and the probationary employees being fired, then also we have this hiring freeze that you were referring to earlier. When did the hiring freeze start?
John Garder: It was a White House directive on January 20th, right off the bat. The memo said you can have exemptions for seasonal employees and emergency related personnel, and there was then a subsequent memo from the acting Interior Secretary, before Burgum came in, that said that those exemptions could be made. And yet what happened was, we saw that people whose jobs included, in whole or in part, public safety-related activities were told that they could no longer work for the Park Service. People who had accepted job offers had those job offers rescinded, and seasonal employees who had changed their lives — who had moved, who were getting ready to enroll their kids in school, and all of these life things — those seasonals were told that they could no longer work for the Park Service.
Jennifer Errick: Now, since that happened, since the seasonal employees were told not to report, that was then later reversed, correct?
John Garder: That's correct. However, it's important to note that that then created a delay of several weeks. And so, what we've been seeing play out was really what experts predicted, which is, the HR process is too slow to onboard all of those people quickly enough for the busy season, when you've had this period of time, during which they couldn't be hiring people. So, you suddenly have an onslaught of jobs where then you have to try to onboard these people, and that's very difficult to do, especially when the Park Service lost some HR people, and they were already understaffed in their HR department. HR was overloaded offboarding all of those people who accepted the fork in the road offer, so it's giving them an impossible task, and what we've been seeing happen is that all the parks that are getting ready for the summer season that would have seasonals on board now in general, they're starting to get some people on, but they're understaffed. And the expectation is that as the weeks go by, they'll increasingly have more and more staff so that by maybe mid-summer it's less of an issue, but of course, they're going to be missing so many permanent staff, and you need people who can manage these seasonal employees, and seasonal employees are no substitute for full-time employees.
Jennifer Errick: So, we still have the hiring freeze, but these probationary employees have now been reinstated. Or so we think. As we speak, the Trump administration is challenging this and asking the Supreme Court to intervene. So, do we have a sense of, if this reinstatement goes through, how many of those people will actually return?
John Garder: Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't think we'll ever be able to get exact numbers. We know that there are people who have already moved their lives, moved away from these communities, sometimes where they've been a part for quite some time. There are also a lot of people who are wondering right now if they want to go back to the Park Service because of this continuing onslaught, and they know more is coming, which is the reduction in force.
Jennifer Errick: And these are such highly specialized positions in many cases. It's, like, this compounding problem, right? Because a probationary staff person who's like, you know, I don't think I want to go back to a job where I could be so easily let go. I've got real skills here. If they leave, the Park Service can't just rehire them, because they have their hands completely tied. So, then, we're in this staffing whiplash. Probationary staff, they're let go, but then they might be coming back. We don't know. And then, around the corner, there's this second reduction in force. I mean, do you have a sense of how many people could be affected in this next round?
John Garder: There are so many pieces to this that it confuses even the experts. It's a shock and awe type of approach. It's really important to emphasize that we are deeply concerned about the loss of expertise of the cultural and natural resources experts that could affect the National Park Service, not just for years, but for decades. When people see an overflowing trash can, that's easy enough to understand. But what people don't think about is when they look at a beautiful landscape, and they see wildlife, and they don't think about the threat of invasive species, they don't think about the expertise that it takes to protect those ecosystems, the research that's needed. When they see historic sites, they don't think about the expertise that's needed to protect and restore those historic sites, the archaeological objects that are out there being catalogued. And the research to help understand the human history that was taking place in so many of these places. People don't think about those things, but they value them.
Jennifer Errick: Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order last Friday, April 17th, to consolidate functions such as IT, communications, finance and human resources across various land management agencies as part of a reduction in force that could lead to a loss of even more staff, including senior-level staff with decades of institutional knowledge. How this order will affect the agency remains to be seen, but experts expect widespread and significant cuts across the park system.
John Garder: Our fear is that when they've cut so many people out of the Park Service, if the intent is to continue to have some basic level of visitor services, and you want to cut even more, then what's left after you've already impacted maintenance activities are the resource experts, and those are the ones that we're really worrying about. That includes support offices. That includes a lot of the places that aren't necessarily parks, but where there are researchers doing planning, where there are researchers working on implementing the many laws that the Park Service has been given by Congress.
Jennifer Errick: Are there scenarios that you're particularly worried about?
John Garder: There are a lot of constraints being put on Park Service personnel, making it difficult for them to do their jobs, protecting resources and serving visitors. Things like the credit card freeze, where people have had their credit cards taken away and just two credit cards per state with a limited credit limit.
Jennifer Errick: Two credit cards per state?
John Garder: Per state.
Jennifer Errick: Per state. So, if you live in a place like California where there are numerous large parks all up and down this large state, or New York where there's parks everywhere, there's only two human beings in the entire state with a credit card that can be used by the Park Service?
John Garder: That's right, with a $25,000 credit limit, is our understanding. And so, what this means is, we're hearing stories of people who can't buy toilet paper, and if they can't get a truckload of toilet paper soon enough, they're going to have to close the bathrooms. People who use those credit cards for when they need quick discretionary purposes or supplies where they can just efficiently get these things done, or basic operations and scientific activities. So, credit cards are also normally used for working with partners and with universities on research that collect data on wildlife migrations. That's just one example of the resource impacts.
Altogether when you add all of these various pieces, the missing people, the freeze to the credit line, the travel ban, and more, you have the hands being tied of Park Service personnel unable to do the basic things to protect resources and to serve visitors. The threats that that creates are diverse.
Jennifer Errick: It sounds like an administrative nightmare. So, you're taking staff away from the parks, and then the staff who are left are spending their time trying to get someone to order toilet paper for them? I mean, that's not efficient, when they could be actually leading a tour or doing whatever their specialized skill is, monitoring, all kinds of things. Instead, they're having to go crazy trying to get their basic stuff?
John Garder: Ironically, it's the height of inefficiency.
Jennifer Errick: Ironically, because it's coming from the Department of Government Efficiency.
John Garder: I guess their argument is that, well, you know, the government's spending too much money on procurement, right? Like buying the things that they need. In the case of the Park Service, a lot of it's construction and maintenance. The way it looks, just at a glance, is that it's going to be harder for the Park Service to purchase materials to provide for park repairs when it takes them forever, and there are all these hurdles to actually just procuring those materials and engaging in the contracts as well, where there are also challenges. They work with private sector construction companies. That's going to cause delays in getting those construction companies out on the ground. You've got the construction industry potentially down the road, who thinks, do I really want a contract with the National Park Service? I don't know if I can trust these guys, and they take forever.
Jennifer Errick: I really appreciate you walking me through these threats one by one, because there are so many of them, and they're interrelated, and they reinforce each other in many ways. How are we challenging these cuts?
John Garder: It's really important that everyone listening to this podcast contact their members of Congress and tell them that this assault on the National Park Service needs to stop. We need members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to reach out to the administration and say that this is reckless, makes no economic sense, threatens the economy, the countless communities who rely on visitor spending and the visitor experience, as well as the protection of these national treasures that the public loves so much. We've seen clear public outcry through protests across the country. Through NPCA's work, we've seen media outlets throughout the country reporting on this, recognizing just how much of a threat this is to the National Park Service.
Jennifer Errick: And it's making a difference.
John Garder: It's making a difference because we've seen a number of actions reversed. The problem is that those actions cannot be entirely undone. There are still significant threats to Park Service personnel and the basic operation of national parks, including the potential reduction in force and the continuing hiring freeze where countless positions for which there is funding remain unfilled.
For every dollar invested in the National Park Service, there's more than $15 in economic activity. It's a huge return on investment. Congress should, of course, be investing more in the National Park Service, especially when polling shows that they are the most popular federal agency, possibly second to the US Postal Service, which is weird, but that's a recent Pew poll that's been that's been making the rounds.
Jennifer Errick: We love the Postal Service, too.
John Garder: Yeah, sure. Of course. Yeah. It's our mail delivered to us.
Jennifer Errick: I mean, can we have parks and mail? I mean, is that a lot to ask?
John Garder: Yeah, is that asking so much?
Jennifer Errick: How could these staffing crises affect day-to-day operations at parks this season? Coming up after the break, I speak with a colleague in an area of the country that has been hit hard by understaffing and overcrowding, and she shares some of the toll this strain has had on staff and visitors alike.
Cassidy Jones: There's this broad sense of being unsure what's going to happen next, folks who are really walking through every day, feeling like they could really be indiscriminately fired at any moment. And that tension, right, all the time when you're trying to do your work, I think it's having a really overwhelming mental effect on people.
Jennifer Errick: That’s next. Stay with us.
[Break]
Did you know that this week is National Park Week? That’s right, a holiday celebrating more than 400 special places we love across the country. NPCA has put together a one-of-a-kind online experience, Camp NPCA, so pack your curiosity and a sense of adventure and check it out.
Park lovers of all ages can complete activities in a virtual obstacle course on our website. Each activity represents an action you can take from the comfort of your own home. Share a social media post, take part in a virtual relay race, or participate in a scavenger hunt for parks. My colleagues are sharing park stories and tips throughout the week in the form of “campfire stories” on social media, so you can follow along and support our work. There’s even a prize for the first 50 “campers” who finish the course! So, check it out at NPCA.org/campNPCA — and happy National Park Week!
[Break]
Drastic cuts to the federal workforce are affecting parks in every part of the country, including places that have already been struggling for years with how to handle an increasing number of visitors with a decreasing number of staff.
My colleague Cassidy Jones is a lifelong resident of Utah, a former park ranger and the visitation program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. She recently wrote a story about how visitors can prepare for traveling to parks while they’re understaffed, which we’ll link to in the show notes. I asked Cassidy to share a bit about Arches, one of the parks that has long suffered from overcrowding, as well as some of the other popular parks near her.
Cassidy Jones: We are very fortunate in the state of Utah to just have some of the most spectacular landscapes on the Colorado Plateau. What people probably notice most about Arches as they go through the wonderland of landscapes here in Utah, it's just this extraordinary display of red rocks. The red sandstone, which has become quite emblematic of the Colorado Plateau in Utah, is really on just full and dramatic display in Arches National Park from the moment you arrive. It also has just the highest concentration of natural arches and windows and land formations like that of really anywhere documented in the world. There's hundreds of these arches in this pretty small area. Moab, which is the city nearby, is really a kind of base that a lot of people use for all kinds of activities that are present either in the park or in the surrounding landscape — BASE jumping and paragliding and rafting and off-roading and mountain biking. And just like all kinds of ways and modes of recreation, are a big part of the region at this time, and have really drawn recreationist kind of explorers, adventures and, you know, tourists of all kinds.
Jennifer Errick: One of the things that really struck me when I was in Moab, which was a few years ago, you know, you have Arches on one side of Moab, and you have Canyonlands not that far away. And they're so different — the formations, the rocks, the vistas. Canyonlands, it’s very spread out, right? It's over many miles. Whereas Arches, my experience there is that so many of these formations and major attractions at the park are right near the road.
Cassidy Jones: You're right, Arches is just kind of right there on the north end of town. Farther away, a little half-hour drive, you get to Island in the Sky, which is one of three districts of Canyonlands National Park, which has a much larger landscape and has a very different kind of experience. Island in the Sky has, like, all these extraordinary vistas, down to the Colorado River. There's the Maze, which is, like, this very remote, very wilderness experience, which is actually just like several hours from Moab to access that area, as well as the Needles, which is another hour, hour and a half, some very different kinds of formations.
Jennifer Errick: I love the Needles! I had such an incredible hike in the Needles.
Cassidy Jones: The Needles are beautiful, and all of these draw different kinds of people interested in different kinds of recreational experiences, you know, within the park. So, there’s a lot going on, and that’s just National Park Service sites and not other land management agencies that are just right there in this corner of the state. I spent a lot of time working with international students, in a volunteer capacity in early adulthood, and would bring people who were visiting Utah from other countries. I had many springs where I brought groups of these students from all over the world to see places like Arches for the very first time and really gain an appreciation for all that, you know, the United States but also Utah has to offer.
Jennifer Errick: And it really is one of the most popular parks in the park system, and so many people want to get in. But it can only have so many people there, because it's not as big as Canyonlands. It's not as big as Yellowstone. Can you share a little bit about how that crunch developed over time and how you helped with this new reservation system there?
Cassidy Jones: There are parts of Utah that have been of interest to visitors for a long time, like Zion. This is in the southwest corner of the state. The landscapes are actually quite different from southeast Utah. And you know, a park like Zion has kind of been busy enough that it instated a shuttle system to efficiently move people through this narrow Zion Canyon as early as 2000. So, this is more than 20 years ago, 25 years ago, that they were beginning to feel a crunch of visitors, feeling like their infrastructure really couldn't accommodate the number of people who were interested. So that's a long history of parks in Utah really being sort of creative and proactive to think about ways to welcome visitors and make sure they have a good quality experience, but also make sure that people are safe, their resources are protected.
So, we can fast forward a little bit to the 2010s. This is when Utah like makes it on the map, right. There's a lot more interest in parks really all over the state and this, like, “Mighty 5” image of the five capital-P national parks in the state. Maybe people have seen the ads on the sides of buses or in airports, or what have you. And to illustrate that the effect of that in Arches, I'll share with you that from 2011 to 2021, visitation at Arches increased by 74%.
Jennifer Errick: Oh my goodness.
Cassidy Jones: If you have 75% more visitors and still really, kind of the same infrastructure, that just becomes extremely difficult to manage effectively, and you get a lot of these traffic bottlenecks, lack of parking, which influences folks to behave in ways that negatively impact, like the resources and also each other. So, you don't have enough parking, you’re parking on the shoulders on those, like, sensitive biological soil crusts, right? When you are looking for a parking spot or you're like crawling through traffic, you're maybe having a lot of folks who are walking on the side of the road and are in kind of dangerous positions with vehicles, because they're walking really far to the trailhead from where they found a parking spot. So, you're having a whole lot of challenges like that at Arches National Park, which kind of led the park in the late 2010s to start closing the gate when the park was really at its parking capacity. And that was not a great situation.
Jennifer Errick: If you've been waiting in line to get in, and then suddenly that gate goes up, I would be mad.
Cassidy Jones: Right. And folks are kind of frustrated because they're unsure when that's going to happen. There's this real big sense of uncertainty and scarcity. So, after a couple of years of that, as well as some terrific upgrades to infrastructure, like totally rerouting the entrance lane to Arches National Park off of the state highway, adding a traffic light, and kind of really improving some parking situations, and it was still just not quite enough, because the interest just kept growing and growing, and Arches National Park became one of several parks to try a strategy called pilot timed entry. The strategy being, everybody tends to do the same thing when they come visit a national park. They have their quiet morning, they go out to breakfast, and then they roll into the park between, like, 10 and 12, and you have this huge bottleneck all at one time. But we need them to spread out their arrivals so that there's enough space in the park to accommodate them. So that's what timed entry does. It provides intervals for people to make a reservation, make a plan, so that lots of people could come visit, but they weren’t all arriving at once.
Jennifer Errick: So, between 2011 and 2021, just ten years, you're seeing a 74% increase in people at the park. And during that same time, you're seeing the level of staffing decrease pretty significantly, prior to recent cuts. Were you finding there were issues with staffing keeping up with visitation?
Cassidy Jones: Absolutely. We've been in this period for several decades of just decreasing staff, especially full-time employees, across the National Park system, as well as decreasing budgets. So, at this period in which parks across each are seeing kind of this meteoric increase in visitation, they're accommodating all of those visitors, welcoming them at a time when their staffs are shrinking and their budgets are shrinking. And in a park like Arches, we're seeing just, like, so many more visitors and so many more issues with crowding and congestion with all those visitors arriving at once, you saw this limited number of staff and shrinking number of staff needing to spend a huge amount of their time managing travel. So, wearing the orange vest, flagging people into parking spots, talking to people, letting them know that the gates are going to be closed, turning people around. Doing things that you don't think a park ranger gets hired to do, and I don't think any park ranger was planning to spend a lot of time doing. It affected what visitors were able to also experience from rangers in terms of other visitor services and programming, as well as important science and other facilities work.
Jennifer Errick: So, now we're in this weird limbo where there have been multiple cuts or interferences with a normal staffing process throughout the park system. We have a hiring freeze. Seasonal employees, whose job offers were rescinded and then approved but with a severe delay. You have long-time employees who are encouraged to retire. And then these probationary employees who were indiscriminately fired, ordered to be reinstated, and that, as we speak, is being challenged by the Trump administration. So, we don't know what's going to happen to these probationary employees, the ones who even want their jobs back. Can you give me a sense of how these multiple crises and hurdles are affecting Arches and these other magnificent parks in this region?
Cassidy Jones: I think the biggest piece that's probably invisible to visitors is just how much staff time is going into creating scenario planning and trying to figure out how they are going to manage the busy season. We are at the very beginning of the busy season, and there is just a lot of time and energy being spent unsure what this situation is going to be like week to week. Like, how will we manage these folks who are going to come no matter what, no matter how many staff we have on board, and we need to figure out a way to keep everybody safe and facilitating a good experience.
I think it's important for folks to realize that especially delays in seasonal staffing, even if they're able to hire just as many seasonal staff as they always do, I think it's extremely unlikely that any of those folks are on board in April or even May, given the huge delay. I've been a park ranger before. You apply for the summer season in December, get your job offer in January, you accept it in February, and that's when the whole process to get you onboarded and background checks so that you're there in April happens. We lost like two months of that work, so no way that April, May, are going to be sufficiently staffed by seasonal employees, and it's going to be just a much smaller group of people who are trying to fill in the gaps.
So, you have education technicians, so people who normally provide programming field trips in classrooms for local students, being pulled from that programming and being at entrance stations. So, that kind of programming in communities is not going to happen.
Jennifer Errick: Like for school kids, that sort of thing?
Cassidy Jones: For school kids. Field trips are not going to get organized, right, because they don't have, really, the staff to organize that. The other kinds of things that are going to happen is people who are conducting the archaeological surveys and doing the monitoring for invasive species or endangered species, right, like people who are doing some of the resource management work behind the scenes, whether it's natural or cultural resource and scientific work — they're also going to be pulled to the front lines to be making sure the restrooms are, you know, clean and helping staff the visitor centers.
That said, I also expect that we'll see necessary reductions in operating hours at facilities that folks come to count on. So, whether that's, like, entrance gates, if there's five, maybe two of them are closed because there's just not enough staff to be there, and we may have shorter visitor center hours, right? Just because even though everyone is trying to pitch in to keep those visitor centers staffed, there's just still not enough staff. They just can't be open this long, right? So, if you roll in at 3:00 or 4:00, it's possible the visitor center is not going to be open, right? Or at other parks, we've seen full days that the visitor center is going to have to be closed because of insufficient staffing.
Jennifer Errick: As a side note, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order on April 3 requiring national park staff to keep all parks open, including visitor centers, campgrounds and trails, despite the administration’s drastic workforce reductions. Park staff have long maintained their independent discretion to close parks -- or just certain trails and areas -- for visitor safety, among other reasons, and this order could force some employees to stop important resource protection work to staff entrance booths and clean restrooms, just as Cassidy and John have feared.
Cassidy Jones: So, these are the sorts of things that visitors will notice, as well as the things that they won't that are all part of a park just really trying to do all that they can with very little and a constantly changing staffing landscape.
Jennifer Errick: Have you heard anything about the morale of staff who have either been let go or chose to retire, or are still there and having to serve in these multiple capacities? That can't feel great.
Cassidy Jones: Yeah, I can really reflect on, for Arches, the period of time when folks were managing parking and closing the gates, prior to 2022. And I mean, midway through the season, staff are just totally burned out. It's like, this is not the job that I signed up for. It's really difficult to be dealing with visitors who are disappointed with their experience over and over again. Also, it’s not what folks are hoping to provide. It's not the kind of interaction they're trying to have with the public, and I can imagine that if visitor services really get so pressed this year because of lack of staffing, there's going to be a lot of that kind of interaction that staff are going to be having with visitors, and that really contributes to burnout.
I think, though, for other folks who I'm familiar with in Utah who work for the parks, there's this broad sense of being unsure what's going to happen next, folks who are really walking through every day, feeling like they could really be indiscriminately fired at any moment. And that tension, right, all the time when you're trying to do your work, I think it's having a really overwhelming mental effect on people.
Jennifer Errick: I wouldn't want to be under the constant threat that I'm just going to get let go. I mean, that's so disrespectful. What are you most concerned could happen?
Cassidy Jones: I think the point that I make is that these are very mission-driven individuals. That's why you join the Park Service. You're really committed to the mission, and I think we find that that's particularly true about the National Park Service. That certainly was my experience. And I think that folks are in a position where they're being asked to kind of do work that they were not hired to do, which I think a lot of folks are willing to do for the greater good, but only for so long. They also I think are going to be in a position, and I remember this well working as a ranger, where you kind of have to, like, put on this air for visitors that everything is fine, because you're a representative of the government and that's really like what you're directed to do.
I can only imagine how old that would get, to like not be able to share your authentic experience with these visitors. We are not creating an environment where young people from Utah see themselves in land management roles. This is not an environment that is conducive to, for instance, interns and volunteers. They have almost no capacity to really, like, facilitate those kinds of experiences where people might discover that they want to be working in national parks. We're going to lose a whole generation of people, which is really tragic.
Jennifer Errick: Do you think this could have a long-term effect on Moab?
Cassidy Jones: The experience people have in the national parks really contributes to sort of the brand of those communities. And if folks are having negative experiences, word gets out and that this is not the best place to plan your vacation. I think that the other element here is the folks who work in these parks live in these communities, and if they don't have jobs, they're not making income to pay the mortgages or their rent or buy goods in these communities, and especially in places where there's a lot of federal land management workers, Moab is a really good example of that across agencies, that has like a measurable economic effect as well as sort of a community, it's a community concern, right, because people's friends and neighbors have been fired, and may have to, you know, move to find work or do something else, take their kids out of the schools and give up their housing or relocate entirely.
Jennifer Errick: I really appreciate you bringing that up, that the economy is not just people like me who come from out of town. It is people in town, people who are from town, also not having the money to spend because the jobs are being lost.
Cassidy Jones: I would like folks to definitely continue to engage with their parks and public lands. This is as important a time as any for people to just like, remember and rediscover their love for parks and public lands, so they have memories to draw on when they are taking the next step, which is advocating and making sure that decisionmakers at lots of levels understand that parks and public lands are really hurting and that they're too valued by the public to weather any more cuts. So, advocacy looks like a lot of things, large and small, you know, from lobbying to writing postcards to penning letters to the editor, and all of those things are needed and welcomed right now.
Jennifer Errick: Park rangers give so much to our country. Plus, they’re cool people — the kinds of folks who want to build their careers by helping others. This is an ever-changing story, and one that NPCA will be in for the long haul. Stay on top of the ways you can defend park staff by signing up for NPCA’s news and alerts at npca.org/join or by taking action at npca.org/advocacy.
[Music]
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 42, Squeezed Thin: Park Staff in Upheaval, was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to Angela Gonzalez, Cory MacNulty and Abbey Robertson.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Read Cassidy Jones’ recent blog story on how to prepare to visit understaffed parks at npca.org/prepare
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org, including one of Cassidy’s favorite winter adventures in episode 15, The Little Jewel Box.
Remember, NPCA’s silent auction is live until April 28, and you can bid on your own podcast-style audio story, for you and about you, as well as many other cool experiences and keepsakes, at npca.org/auction
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org.