During the government shutdown of 2019, the Trump administration kept national parks open to the public, even though a majority of the staff was furloughed. Without enough rangers to welcome visitors and enforce rules, the parks suffered.
Joshua trees in California were cut down to make room for campsites. People illegally drove off-road vehicles across the treasured dry lake beds in Death Valley National Park, leaving scars that can take decades to heal. Trash and human waste spread across Yosemite.
On Friday, more than 35 former park superintendents wrote a letter to the Trump administration, imploring officials not to let it happen again and to close the national parks if the government shuts down next week.
“Past shutdowns in which gates remained open with limited staff have hurt our parks,” they wrote in a letter to the secretary of interior, Doug Burgum. “If you don’t act now, history is not just doomed to repeat itself, the damage could in fact be much worse.”
The Interior Department has not yet posted its plans in the event of a shutdown, raising anxiety about a repeat of 2019.
This year, leaving the parks open is even riskier, the former superintendents said.
Parks have already been operating with a skeletal staff because of President Trump’s vast cuts to the federal work force. Preservation work, both historical or biological, has been left undone in some parks, because biologists have had to staff visitor centers so they could stay open. Emergency services are limited. And employees have had to put off routine maintenance to fill in vacancies.
A New York Times investigation found that at least one-fifth of the country’s 433 national parks were strained over the summer, understaffed because of the administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal work force. As the busy summer season ends, seasonal employees are leaving, stretching staff even more.
“If national parks are to be open to visitors when National Park employees are furloughed, these nascent issues from the summer season are sure to erupt,” the former superintendents wrote.
Leaving parks open and severely understaffed is both irresponsible and dangerous, said Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America National Parks, an advocacy group of current and former national park employees.
“We don’t leave museums open without curators, or airports without air traffic controllers and we should not leave our national parks open” without National Park Service workers, Ms. Thompson said. “If the government shuts down, so should the national parks.”
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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