President Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office sent shock waves through the National Park Service, a 20,000-strong agency of park rangers and desk jockeys who oversee some of the nation’s most beloved lands.
From a hiring freeze that could cripple parks during the upcoming busy season to a blanket invitation sent out to all federal employees to resign, NPS staffers have faced a volley of presidential edicts unusual for this early in a new administration and aimed at cutting their ranks.
“It’s a scary time,” a park ranger in a Western state with 15 years in the federal service told POLITICO’s E&E News. The person, who was granted anonymity because they were afraid of reprisal from the Trump administration, said the first two weeks of the administration have been “brutal” for the service.
The Appointment of Doug Burgum
Enter Doug Burgum. The former Republican governor of North Dakota was sworn in last week to helm the Interior Department, which oversees the park service. Until now the flurry of orders coming from the White House were being implemented by a skeleton crew of political hires from the Trump administration called a “beachhead” team, in reference to the first line of soldiers who landed on a beach in a coastal attack.
Outside observers said they hope Burgum brings some order to the service’s new regime under Trump, as well as act as an authoritative voice reporting to the White House.
“Secretary Burgum must be given the opportunity to explain to the White House the terrible impacts [the hiring freeze] is having on the park service and how much this threatens the ability to accommodate those millions of visitors,” said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association.
Trump signed a Jan. 20 executive order stopping all new hiring across the federal government.
While a secretarial order, signed that same day by then-acting Secretary Walter Cruickshank, exempts seasonal employees from the freeze, reports have been rampant of seasonal hires being told they no longer had offers.
The NPCA said the group believes that roughly 2,000 people had their job offers revoked in the last two weeks amid uncertainty over how Trump’s order from his first day in office applies to seasonal hires.
“The hiring freeze is a serious problem for NPS as January and February are when the NPS begins the hiring for the summer operations,” Jon Jarvis, who served as NPS director under the Obama administration, said in an email. “The NPS hires roughly 8,000 seasonal employees for 3-6 months. Seasonal employees provide much of the basic visitor services from fee collection to interpretation, search and rescue, law enforcement, resource management.”
Challenges Faced by Maintenance Crews
Interior and the National Park Service did not respond to requests for comment.
Among the uncertainties now is, with a confirmed Interior secretary in place, whether parks can begin to hire again for the season — and whether applicants who had their job offers rescinded have to restart the federal hiring process, a monthslong slog, before they can come onboard.
“It’s a long and slow process,” said the Western park ranger. “We asked our seasonal employees to apply for jobs in October. They interview in December. We try to make the decisions in late December, early January. The paperwork then takes three months, and we start them in mid-April.”
Mark Cochran runs maintenance crews for the Gettysburg National Military Park and Eisenhower National Historical Site in Pennsylvania and is the representative for the union, American Federation of Government Employees Local 3145. He said roughly three-quarters of his staff during the six-month busy season are seasonal hires.
The park hires roughly a dozen people for the grounds work. Across the 6,000 acres of Gettysburg alone, those seasonal workers repair fences, mow the grass, fix trails, pick up garbage, clean bathrooms and cut down broken or aging trees, Cochran said.
Impact on National Park Visitors
National park advocates have long argued that the parks are overloaded with work, with fewer full-time staff members today than a decade ago due to budget cuts. Over that same time the nation’s parks have seen a massive increase in visitors. Roughly 326 million people visited national parks in 2023, a 13 million-visitor increase compared to the prior year, according to NPS data.
For many parks the busy season that once started in summers now gets going months before during spring break. In places like the Northeast, the busy season can last until the autumn leaves change, said Phil Francis, chair of the executive committee for the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
“They’re talking about more cuts at a time when we have more parks than ever and visitation last year was something like 325 million people,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Francis, a 41-year veteran of the park service who once served as superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway, also took aim at the Trump administration’s broader effort to slash parks and cut staff.
Resignation Invitations and Employee Morale
An email blasted out to all federal employees last week titled “A Fork in the Road” encouraged the entire federal workforce to resign in exchange for what was described as a paid leave. For those who stay, the memo from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management said: “We cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency, but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity.”
Workers who opt to resign were encouraged to take on a new job, while they allegedly could continue being paid for their government work through the end of September.
“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” the agency said.
Francis said the invitation to resign would sap morale at an agency overwhelmingly beloved by the public.
“I can’t imagine a worse time to be a civil servant,” said House Natural Resources ranking member Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, in an interview. “They are just being scapegoated and vilified and intimidated and summarily fired like nothing we’ve ever seen.”
Huffman said the administration acts without thinking about the impact of its policies.
“They touch the hot stove over and over again,” he said. “It’s just hard to say what they’re thinking, or even if they’re thinking.”
The OPM letter has sparked frustration and indignation from many in the park service, who have taken to social media to express it.
A Reddit thread, under a graphic of the Statue of Liberty and the text “Hold the line, don’t resign,” suggested some park employees were resolved to stay in their positions. It was upvoted at least 18,000 times as of Monday.
Cochran said branding federal workers as unproductive is offensive and noted that he has no plans to take the resignation offer.
“That rubbed me the wrong way,” he said. “I’m surrounded by some of the hardest-working, most fantastic people I’ve met my entire life.”
But Cochran said he wasn’t surprised by the administration’s push. The Trump administration campaigned on drastically cutting the size of the federal government, he said. It’s the speed that it is trying to push people out of the federal workforce that has shocked him.
The Trump administration ordered NPS to report all of its employees currently within a standard one-year probationary period, as well as those hired with money from the Inflation Reduction Act and those employed in programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. Interior last week gave itself 30 days to end those programs, and Trump has ordered a layoff of people working in those programs across the federal government.
An edict from the administration on Friday also ordered agencies to break federal union bargaining agreements that were signed in recent months, which is expected to face legal action. AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement Monday that the president lacks the authority to break contracts.
“If our contracts are violated, we will aggressively defend them,” Kelley wrote.
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