Trump vs. America's National Parks
What a sprained ankle reveals about how badly stretched park workers are
If you want to enjoy a deep sense of awe and even some aw-shucks patriotism during these dark days, go visit a national park. To prove it, here are some pics from our spring break trip to some of Utah’s incredible parks. Even with a seven year old iPhone camera, they look amazing.
Breathtaking landmarks need people to manage the crowds that flock to see them. National Park Service staff oversee the welfare of sometimes tens of thousands of visitors over thousands of acres on any given day. Most visitors don’t need help beyond direction or maybe a little history. But they sometimes get lost, or sick. Park Ranger duties include search and rescue, policing, fire fighting and emergency medical treatment.
We had a first-hand experience of this at Zion National Park. One of us (Pam) tripped about a mile into a trail and sprained her ankle. The trained paramedic ranger assessed not only the ankle, but did a series of field tests to ensure the fall wasn’t the result of a more serious medical reason (other than sheer clumsiness). They braced the ankle, but still unable to walk, and in an area inaccessible by car, the Park Rangers evacuated Pam on what they called a “glorified wheelbarrow.”
We chatted with one of the Rangers who noted that the park normally has three to four rangers with EMS and security experience. The day we were there, which was not high season, there were about 35,000 people in the park. What would have happened if another one or two people got hurt in a different part of the 229 square miles of the Zion while two of those three Rangers were with us?
Zion has fewer staff managing about 90% more visitors since 2010. And Zion has lost another 13 employees due to DOGE layoffs not reflected in the chart below. These are not sustainable trends.
It’s especially jarring if you consider that the budget for Zion was $9 million in 2023, but its estimated economic impact on the community is almost $1 billion in terms of related visitor spending and jobs generated.
Zion is representative of the NPS as a whole. In fact, since 2010, the National Park Service’s inflation adjusted budget has shrunk by 17%, even as the number of visitors has increased by 16%.
(Of course, it’s likely NPS will see a downturn in visitors this year as international tourists stop coming to the US. On the other hands, Americans won’t be able to afford to vacation abroad, so it might even out).
DOGE is running our National Parks (into the ground)
Some bad news: DOGE will now be running your national parks, bringing their patented brand of chaos and dysfunction to America’s coolest places.
Is the NPS inefficient? Does it need the expertise of DOGErs who don’t go outside? Consider:
For the roughly $2.9 billion in the annual federal budget, our national parks generate $55.6 billion to the economy. The Trump proposed cutting the budget by $1.2 billion, or 40%.
Our National Parks System offers life changing experiences for an annual pass of $80. What a deal!
The NPS is our most popular federal agency, viewed favorably by 3 out of 4 Americans, and unfavorably by just 7%.
NPS had 331 million visitors last year, a record. Put another way, the equivalent of the entire US population visited a national park in a single year.
As performance measures go, this is all pretty impressive! NPS is a beloved institution, one that keeps doing more with less, and generates far more revenue than it costs. And having a record year is something to be proud of, right? Maybe it’s time to increase investments consistent with the value the NPS is creating? Wrong. The Trump administration has instructed communications staff to downplay public reporting about visitors numbers. Why? Because a clear measure of record demand for public services runs contrary to their goal of cutting NPS staff.
And cutting is exactly what Trump is doing with NPS. Despite the long-term pattern of workforce decline amidst record visitors, DOGE has rescinded job offers, and fired around 1,000 probationary employees. Another 1,100 NPS staff have taken “fork in the road” resignation offers, and 700 more took early retirement. All told, this adds up to about 13% of the NPS’s workforce, with the potential for more even reductions-in-force to come. Indeed, the Trump Administration is pushing for a 30% reduction in payroll at the NPS.
It is important to remember that as with every government agency, DOGE cuts are the result of no analysis about workforce needs or the strategic direction of the agency. They reflect, instead, the Trump Administration’s deep conviction that no public work has any value, even when it involves helping record numbers of Americans see their country’s more glorious landmarks.
The reason why DOGE skipped the analysis, and why the Trump administration is avoiding publicity about the number of visitors, is because even a cursory look at the data shows that NPS cannot keep adding more and more visitors with fewer and fewer employees. The proposed 30% cuts would devastate national parks, while saving a grand total of 0.003% of the federal budget.
This is not efficiency. It a Grand Canyon-sized symbol of DOGE lunacy.
It gets worse. Doug Burgum, the billionaire Secretary of the Interior (which includes the NPS) has completely delegated much of his job to Tyler Hassen, a DOGEr. He signed an order giving Hassen control of “human resources, information technology, financial management, training and development, international affairs, contracting, communications, federal financial assistance, and other administrative functions” to oversee the “consolidation, unification, and optimization of administrative functions.”
This is remarkable on a number of levels:
DOGE has been systematically double-hatting employees, who serve in a one or more Departments while also representing DOGE. This has allowed them to put their tentacles in every part of government, minus any clear structure of accountability.
Burgum just handed over the running of his agency to a DOGEr with no Senate confirmation and little apparent background beyond serving as an executive at an oil equipment company. Hassen can fire people, cancel contracts or make major policy decisions without Burgum’s approval. Hassen already put a career civil servant on administrative leave pending firing for raising concerns about the risks arising from Hassen’s request to have root access (not just viewing access) to Interior’s payroll system. The official made clear the final decision rested with Secretary Burgum: his crime appears to have been to put the risks in writing when DOGE wants as little accountability as possible.
One problem with a Cabinet of billionaires is that professional politicians care about their reputation. A sane politician would not give up control of our most popular agency, especially to someone unqualified to run it, because they would know that they will be ultimately blamed for any failures. A billionaire can simply move on.
Jennifer Rokala, the executive director of the Center for Western Priorities said in a statement:
If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now. Instead, it looks like Burgum plans to sit by the fire, eating warm cookies, while Elon Musk’s lackeys dismantle our national parks and public lands. This order shows what it looks like when leaders abdicate their jobs and let unqualified outsiders fire thousands of civil servants who are working on behalf of all Americans and their public lands.
That thing about the cookies and fireplace? Apparently Burgum has ordered staff to learn how to bake cookies for his guests at the Department of Interior, and how to appropriately stack firewood in his office’s fireplace.
Ignoring the climate change challenge for national parks
The big picture is that the NPS is already understaffed, and worker morale is lower than you would expect for what is many employees’ dream job, lagging below the average for other federal subagencies.
It is not just that park employees are dealing with more visitors with fewer resources. Climate change is making the job harder. Though the Trump Administration is scrapping any mention of climate change from the federal government, the NPS can’t ignore it. Temperatures in the parks have increased twice as fast as the country as a whole, because parks tend to be located in climate sensitive regions. While the Inflation Reduction Act (which was mostly a climate change bill) devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to help national parks prepare for climate change, that money has now been frozen by Trump, leaving the NPS to deal with climate change on its own.
As the weather gets hotter, Rangers are frequently called out for issues ranging from dehydration and heat stroke to heat induced heart attacks and serious injuries. Delays are deadly in emergency response. The Ranger we spoke with said the summers were increasingly brutal, with large chunks of their time devoted to firefighting. He also noted that not everyone who visits the parks leaves alive.
Rangers recover the remains of people who die in the park (about 250 per year), and this task is likely to get worse. One NPS employee said: “The odds of search-and-rescue missions turning into recoveries [of dead bodies] will be a lot higher this year than most.”
Our national parks are a trust. Each generation should strive to be good stewards, passing on these incredible gifts to the next. In this, national parks are not unlike government itself. If we actually love our national parks, and respect the people trying serving there, we would not allow administrative vandals to decimate that trust.
 | A guest post by
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I retired a year ago from NPS. I started as a volunteer and two years later got a seasonal student pathways position, then part time non perm, then permanent. I worked as a ranger in the field daily, living on an island. I ended my career as a budget analyst for the Washingtin D.C. office, GS-13, managing a $15m budget. There is nothing about this takeover that supports efficiency or cost savings. People will die. They will die faster and they may not be recovered for years. Local communities who depend on the economic boon of tourists will also die. DOGE is a sham.
Thank you, Pamela and Don. Our Parks are National Treasures gifted to us by those before us, it is so sad that we are even talking about cuts like this. In the last 5 years, I have been to Yosemite, Glacier National, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capital Reef, Sequoia, Rocky Mountain and Shenandoah. The number one reason I went to Montana and Utah was to see the National Parks (VA, that was for our Colonial History and CO was for a wedding). MT and UT got my tourism dollars that without the Parks, the money I spent as a visitor in their cities and towns would have been zero.
I believe NPS lack of outrage is three-fold. 1) The firehose of DOGE cuts has been hard to keep up with and many are exhausted. 2) Schools are mostly still in session, so peak demand has not hit yet. 3) Trump's tariffs are killing the Economy and people fear for their lively hood first.
As you stated, the few billion spent at the federal level on the Parks bring way more than 10 times that to our overall economy. The Park Rangers and employees were awesome. The local townspeople were awesome. These cuts will be devastating to the local economies near the parks, which is probably why the only protests seem to be there.