The visitors who trek to America’s national parks are already noticing the changes, just months after President Donald Trump took office.
“I’ve been visiting national parks for 30 years and never has the presence of rangers been so absent,” one visitor to Zion National Park wrote in National Parks Service public feedback obtained by CNN.
The visitor said they saw just one trail crew at the iconic Utah park. There were no educational programs offered at any of the five parks they visited on their trip.
“Hire back park staff. We need them,” the visitor wrote.
At Yosemite, another visitor said there were no rangers at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir entrance station, preventing visitors from picking up wilderness permits.
“More staff would be a BIG and IMPORTANT improvement,” that visitor wrote.
America’s most treasured national parks are getting crunched by Trump’s government-shrinking layoffs just as the summer travel season gets into full swing.
Top officials vowed to hire thousands of seasonal employees to pick up the slack after the Trump administration fired around 1,000 NPS employees as part of wide-ranging federal firings known as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Department of Interior officials said in a February memo they would aim to hire 7,700 seasonal workers at NPS, and post listings for 9,000 jobs.
But those numbers haven’t materialized ahead July 4th — the parks’ busiest time of the year. Internal National Park Service data provided to CNN by the National Parks Conservation Association shows that about 3,300 seasonal and temporary staff have been hired — less than half of the administration’s stated goal.
Full-time staff numbers are down, too; as of May 13, the parks service had 18,066 employees, including full-time and seasonal positions, nearly 16.5% fewer staff than it had in the previous year. That’s the lowest staffing level in over 20 years, according to Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.
Some parks, including Yellowstone, have increased their staff this year. But with low staffing levels at other parks unlikely to meaningfully improve this year, Kym Hall, a former NPS regional director and park superintendent, told CNN she worries park rangers and other staff could hit a breaking point later this summer.
“By mid-August, you’re going to have staff that is so burned out,” Hall said. “Somebody is going to make a mistake, somebody is going to get hurt. Or you’re going to see visitors engaging with wildlife in a way that they shouldn’t, because there aren’t enough people out in the parks to say, ‘do not get that close to a grizzly bear that’s on the side of the road; that’s a terrible idea.’”
The National Parks Service did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on its staffing levels.
Meanwhile, visitors are arriving in droves. Last year set a new record for recreation visits at nearly 332 million, smashing the previous record set in 2016.
Hall said the process of hiring thousands of seasonal workers for the summer takes months, typically starting in the previous fall or winter to fully staff up.
“Even if the parks had permission, and even if they had some funding, it takes months and months to get a crew of seasonal (workers) recruited, vetted, hired, boarded into their duty stations, trained and ready to serve the public by Memorial Day,” Hall said.
Compounding the staffing issue is the fact that many park superintendents, some of whom oversee the most iconic parks like Yosemite, have retired or taken the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offers. That leaves over 100 parks without their chief supervisor, Brengel said.
And amid the staff losses, staffers normally assigned to park programming, construction, and trail maintenance, as well as a cadre of park scientists, have been reassigned to visitor services to keep up with the summer season.
Questioned by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill about the low staffing numbers, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has brushed off concerns, testifying in May that slightly less than half of permanent NPS employees work on the ground in the parks, while other staff work at regional offices or at DC headquarters.
“I want more people in the parks,” Burgum said. “I want less overhead. There’s an opportunity to have more people working in our parks … and have less people working for the National Park Service.”
But internal NPS data tells a different story, Brengel said, showing that around 80% of National Park Service staff work in the parks. And regional offices play an important supporting staff role, with scientists on staff to help maintain fragile parks ecosystems, as well as specialists who monitor geohazard safety issues like landslides.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska recently pressed Burgum to provide a full list of staff positions that have been cut at the National Parks Service, Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service since the Trump administration took over. The Interior Department has not provided the list, a Senate staffer said.
The regional offices within the Parks Service are on edge, waiting to see how courts rule on a Trump administration reduction in force plan they fear could gut their ranks, a National Park Service employee in a Western state told CNN.
“If they greenlight the RIF plan, then it’s going to be a bloodbath,” the employee said.
In addition to probationary workers that were fired in February, early retirements are also culling the agency’s ranks, and the continued $1 spending limit on federal workers’ credit cards is making it extremely difficult to do field work in the parks, with a simple overnight trip needing to be requested 10 days in advance, the employee added.
The lack of superintendents and NPS supervisors creates more of a headache, they added.
“These times, when it’s all about fighting for scarce resources, you really need those upper-level people with clout working the system,” the employee said.
Hall, the retired NPS regional director, said losing rangers, maintenance professionals and park superintendents could profoundly alter American landmarks.
“What you’ve lost with all this attrition – you’ve lost all this knowledge that’s going to take years to build back up,” Hall said.
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