Workers say the real crisis is happening behind the scenes.<\/b>
\nThis summer, many of Americans\u2019 fears about their national parks\u2014that budget cuts and staffing shortages would lead to unsafe, or at least unpleasant, vacations\u2014did not come to pass. Gates and visitor centers were open (with reduced hours) and toilets were usable (mostly). Visitors to the Grand Canyon who developed heat exhaustion were still rescued. To the public, a trip to the national parks must have seemed normal enough, down to tourists getting way too close to bison at Yellowstone.
But rangers say the real crisis is happening beyond the trails and campgrounds, where visitors can\u2019t see it. Park employees\u2019 experiences, which several people described to me and dozens more have shared publicly, suggest that the Department of the Interior sacrificed long-term stewardship of American lands to maintain a veneer of normalcy for this summer\u2019s crowds. \u201cWe are really pulling out all the stops to make sure that the impacts are being hidden,\u201d an emergency-services ranger in the western United States told me. (She and other park employees I spoke with for this story requested anonymity, out of fear of losing their job.)
The National Park Service lost about a quarter of its permanent staff to mass firings, buyouts, early retirements, and resignations this winter and spring. In April, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum made the department\u2019s priorities for the remaining staff clear: In an order, he declared that parks had to stay \u201copen and accessible\u201d and \u201cprovide the best customer service experience for all visitors.\u201d Any facility closures or reduced hours would need to be approved by NPS and Department of Interior leadership in Washington. The order alluded to the general importance of conservation but showed little interest in research, monitoring, or maintenance.
This work has always happened at the periphery of the public\u2019s experience of national parks, but it\u2019s what keeps both their natural and human-made features from deteriorating. National Park Service researchers conducted 28,000 studies from 2000 to 2016, working at 412 parks, historical sites, memorials, and battlefields at any given time. The studies help workers protect what\u2019s inside park boundaries by spotting early signs of trouble in time to help, and by contributing to general knowledge about climate change, ecological restoration, and wildfires.
All of that research required an army of employees, many of whom are now out of a job. Ryan Valdez, the senior director of conservation science at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), told me that the Park Service\u2019s science arm, which once employed hundreds of people in land, water, air, wildlife, and climate-change programs, is \u201cpretty much dismantled.\u201d (The Department of the Interior declined to confirm this account.) The ranger in the West told me that her park lost its only wildlife biologist. According to the NPCA, Olympic National Park no longer has permanent fisheries biologists to help assess damage resulting from a nearby gas-and-diesel spill, and layoffs have left only one employee to oversee archaeology and cultural-resource protection for Alaska\u2019s 23 park sites. NPS staff members from across the country have reported to Resistance Rangers, a group of off-duty and former rangers documenting cuts and policy changes within the NPS, that they were forced to pause their monitoring of tree health, glacier size, and other measures of ecological well-being. North Cascades National Park has no lead wildlife biologist to monitor bear movements (and wrangle human-bear conflicts), according to Save Our Parks, another advocacy group. The scientists still working at the parks haven\u2019t reliably been doing science, either: In April, for instance, biologists in Yosemite were cleaning toilets.
Preserving the parks\u2019 ecologies in the face of climate change and heavy visitor traffic requires active work. Without the copious, current data collected through research, parks workers may be caught off guard by environmental and ecological upheavals. Researchers help track and maintain the well-being of imperiled species in the parks: bats in Acadia, grizzly bears in Glacier, numerous native-plant species in Everglades. Stephanie Adams, the conservation-programs director at NPCA, told me that the cuts to science and conservation work threaten such species\u2019 long-term health. Any one species\u2019 loss could trigger collapse up and down an ecosystem\u2019s food chain\u2014a crisis that park workers will be poorly equipped to adapt to if they can\u2019t see it coming.
The Department of the Interior disputed its employees\u2019 characterizations of this summer\u2019s staffing levels. \u201cConservation and access are not mutually exclusive, they are the foundation of the NPS mission, and we are achieving both,\u201d Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for the department, told me in an email. She also wrote that \u201cscience, monitoring and preservation efforts remain active across the National Park System,\u201d and that staffing levels at the national parks this summer were \u201con par with previous years.\u201d Independent accounts, though, have documented delays in seasonal hiring for the busy summer months, and a hiring freeze across most of the federal government is still in effect, keeping vacant positions at the National Park Service unfilled.
Meanwhile, parks across the country are in need of crucial maintenance. Before this year, NPS already had a long-standing and growing maintenance backlog for roads, bridges, historic structures, campgrounds, and trails; last year, the agency estimated that needed repairs would cost nearly $23 billion. And the bill keeps mounting: Take this summer\u2019s Dragon Bravo Fire, which burned more than 145,000 acres, destroying a historic lodge, a visitor center, and other park buildings in the Grand Canyon. Besides emergencies, the parks\u2019 natural landscapes need care too. But NPS\u2019s ability to provide it could be endangered by the rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act, which funded projects such as salt-marsh restoration on the East Coast and a hazardous-landfill cleanup in Yosemite. According to recent reporting by The New York Times, 30 parks reported cuts to maintenance this year.
The more that projects pile up without being addressed, the greater the likelihood that NPS simply won\u2019t have the money or workers to keep the parks in a safe condition. The Trump administration\u2019s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year\u2014which suggested $1.2 billion in cuts to NPS funding, the largest in the history of the agency\u2014would only worsen the parks\u2019 infrastructure problems. (Congress has yet to approve a final budget; the House Appropriations Committee proposed $176 million in cuts to NPS operations and $37 million in cuts to construction funding.) The parks risk remaining open with neglected landscapes, ragged trails, and disappearing biodiversity.
The national parks, perhaps more than any other American project, represent a hopeful commitment to the future. The 1916 Organic Act, which established the NPS, states that parks must \u201cprovide for the enjoyment\u201d of the scenery, wildlife, and natural and historic objects within them and also leave them \u201cunimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.\u201d A fully functioning National Park Service doesn\u2019t just serve a given summer\u2019s visitors. It also ensures that the unique flora, fauna, and geologic wonders under its care survive in the decades to come, despite the stresses of climate change, invasive species, and the parks\u2019 own popularity.
But the rangers I spoke with fear that their mission is unraveling. \u201cPart of what we do is making sure that our kids will be able to experience the same thing, that we\u2019re protecting these places responsibly for the next generation,\u201d one ranger, who was fired in February and reinstated in late March, told me. \u201cWe are losing the ability to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n