As the Trump administration continues its campaign to slash the federal workforce, more than 700 year-round National Park Service employees have taken buyouts, according to an internal email sent to supervisors late last week.
That brings to at least 1,700 the number of year-round permanent staff members that the service — arguably America’s most beloved federal agency — has lost this month. The number equates to roughly 9% of the agency’s workforce.
In addition, remaining staff members have been banned from traveling for work purposes — unless it’s to support national security or immigration enforcement — and some staffers have found that the credit cards they use to purchase gas for service vehicles and basic supplies such as toilet paper for the restrooms have been deactivated, according to interviews with Park Service employees and internal documents shared with The Times. It’s not clear how long those measures will be in place.
If the cuts aren’t restored, “this just isn’t going to be the same Park Service,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Assn. “All of these places are so beautiful and have been so well-protected for so long; continuing to chip away at the staff is illogical.”
National Park Service officials did not respond to a request for comment.
A memo sent last week to Park Service supervisors from Rita J. Moss, the agency’s associate director for workforce and inclusion, said, “We have over 700 across the service” who are “participating in the Deferred Resignation Program.”
That’s the name given by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency for the buyout program, which allows federal employees to resign now but continue receiving their salaries and benefits through September. Such programs generally attract older employees nearing retirement.
At the other end of the spectrum, about 1,000 probationary Park Service employees — generally people in their first two years of service who do not yet have employment protections afforded more seasoned workers — were fired Feb. 14 along with tens of thousands of other probationary federal employees in a multiagency purge.
The permanent staffers who are fired or taking the buyout include people who collect fees at park entrances, maintenance workers who clean park facilities and rangers who patrol the backcountry and rescue lost and injured hikers.
Adding to the operational chaos for Park Service supervisors, the Trump administration in January notified thousands of seasonal workers who staff America’s 433 national parks and historical sites during peak seasons that their job offers for the 2025 season had been “rescinded.” The move set off panic in the ranks of park employees, and threw into limbo the vacation plans of hundreds of millions of people who visit the parks each year.
Confronted with public outcry — and grave warnings that iconic national parks such as Yosemite and the Grand Canyon might be too short-staffed to safely operate — the Trump administration reversed course last week. It backed off the plan to eliminate seasonal employees and even increased the number of temporary workers the parks will be allowed to hire, from roughly 6,300 to as many as 7,700.
The shifting goalposts have left supervisors’ heads spinning.
“It’s so crazy, because they give us no warning, and shut down stuff randomly with, like, 12-hours’ notice,” said one Park Service supervisor who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. “We would never do that to the public.”
The disarray comes on the heels of nearly 15 years without significant funding increases in the National Park Service’s operating budget, Brengel said. “That means many employees do more than one job already, and have been doing so for years,” she said.
Despite the pressure on remaining employees to “do more with less,” as managers in moribund enterprises are so fond of saying, the parks themselves have never been more popular.
More than 325 million people visited America’s national parks in 2023. That’s considerably more than twice the number of people (136 million) who attended professional football, baseball, basketball and hockey games combined.
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