On Feb. 24, a surprising new directive filtered down from the U.S. Department of the Interior to ground-level workers at the National Park Service. Weird policy initiatives were by then a fact of life for workers in the federal government, who blew a couple of weeks immediately following Donald Trump's second inauguration frantically chasing DEI phantoms out of their agencies' contracts and charters, at the expense of operational priorities. Chaos is the new norm. "You always get these statements ahead of a transition, from agency leadership, where they say, 'Hey, it's a change in governance, a change of policy, it's going to be difficult, but we'll all get through it together,'" a veteran of the National Park Service described to Defector. "But then on Day One it was executive order after executive order after executive order, and they don't even jibe with each other, and many of them probably aren't legal. I don't think our system is equipped to deal with someone who is ready to flood the zone like this."
The directive of Feb. 24 did not flow directly from an executive order, but its bizarre demands tidily express the administration's guiding hostility to the very idea of a functioning federal government. In an email sent down the chain by a Department of Interior Regional Finance Officer and viewed by Defector, agency administrative officers were alerted that "the spending threshold for all purchase and travel cards" would be reset the following day, to a new maximum of one dollar. "So now, even if it’s essential spending, for public safety or things like that, if it costs more than a buck, park leadership has to send all of their spending requests to one person at regional, who in our case is servicing 105 units across the West," said the NPS veteran, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. "I don’t know how that person drew the short straw. There are very few operations that don't buy things on a day-to-day basis, to serve the public." In the days since the directive was issued, DOI has increased the manpower at regional devoted to handling purchasing requests, from one sad-sack individual to two.
For the people tasked with running the nation's parks, this is a debilitating new inefficiency. Every little operation associated with running a national park requires supplies, in many cases shipped to remote locations and requiring advanced planning or complicated logistics. Rangers use purchasing cards to stock up on search-and-rescue equipment; those in security buy ammunition and gear; everyone across the network needs pens and paper, lightbulbs, a sudden get-me-over supply of toilet paper or trash bags. And then there are recurring expenses and automated payments: The NPS veteran told Defector that these payments are expected to bounce, potentially cutting off internet and crucial VOIP phone service for workers in far-flung areas. The only exceptions to the new restriction, described in the email from the Regional Finance Officer, are for the purchasing cards of staff who are currently out on travel, and for fleet cards. "You can still put gas in your car, I guess," explained the NPS veteran.
It's shaping up to be a terrible year for public lands. The National Park Service in the 21st century is never not understaffed. More than 1,000 full-time NPS workers were purged on Feb. 14, further stretching the agency's human resources with just weeks to go before the start of the busy part of the schedule. Experienced workers were indiscriminately wiped out based entirely on probationary status, which for federal workers is a clunky administrative designation unrelated to performance, operational value, or tenure. Ahead of the purge, the Office of Personnel Management gave agencies a condensed timeline and a limit of 200 characters to advocate on behalf of any particular probationary employee. One NPS worker who was purged on Valentine's Day described for Defector receiving a form letter via email, which said that they "failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment." The email, says the fired worker, contained conspicuous misspellings, and deployed only very vague language to justify the termination. It should go without saying that the method of termination ignores existing federal guidelines for reductions in force.
"I had just gone into a new position in the fall, and I learned from park leadership and my direct supervisor that they received guidance that they were to collect names of all probationary employees at the unit," said the fired NPS worker, who has joined a class-action lawsuit seeking reinstatement, back pay, and damages. "It seemed pretty obvious to me and to a lot of people that that was to try to get easy pickings for people to lay off." After years of work with the agency, turning up each day to provide specialized labor at remote locations for comparatively low pay, the abrupt termination left this person in the lurch. "It’s hard trying to just move on and find something else, because it would be a complete career change. And it’s hard thinking of trying to move somewhere else and uprooting my family in order to try to salvage my career." On Feb. 27, a federal judge ruled that OPM cannot indiscriminately fire probationary workers at other agencies. On March 4, the Trump administration rescinded its guidance to agencies to terminate probationary employees, past the point when all the toothpaste had been squeezed from the tube and also the tube had been thrown down a bottomless well.
Supervisors at national parks are also barred from filling permanent positions that were vacant before the inauguration, due to an ongoing federal hiring freeze, directed by a Day One executive order. The NPS veteran has not yet been terminated, but things are changing by the day, and the job is becoming impossible. "Our immediate supervisors don't know shit. Nobody knows if we're about to get RIF'd," they said. For a while there was some confusion over whether parks would be allowed to beef up their staffing levels with "seasonals," brought on annually to work the busiest times. The administration finally gave NPS permission, days after the purge, to hire 7,700 temporary workers. But there's a problem: NPS typically only adds about 6,300 seasonals per year, and that's with much more time to hire and with more personnel to do the hiring. It's not easy to round up a staff of capable seasonals, especially out West, where parks are enormous and workers are expected to live and work far from population centers.
"We don’t have the time or the applicants—people who are willing to move across the country to work at GS-5, I think it’s like $19.50 an hour, for six months," says the NPS veteran, whose park has been approved to add seasonal workers in the double digits for the busy warm months. "I get the feeling that they’re trying to swing this as, Not only did we increase visitor services, we gave them the capacity, they can hire as many people as they want. People would love to work for the Park Service but the jobs tend to be in rural, remote areas, with the fewest services, for relatively low pay." And the jobs come with less security than ever, less even than was enjoyed by the outgoing probationary workers. "That makes me really scared for them. Because you want to bring them on and give them a really good experience and show them how to do good work for the American public, but if anything happens to them, supervisors are very limited in what can be done to protect them. It’s more practical for people to just go, like, work in an Amazon warehouse in your hometown for $22 an hour, and not have to move and uproot your life for a temporary assignment that might blow up over email after two weeks."
The government workers who spoke with Defector have been struck by the grinding and in some cases unworkable inefficiencies being foisted upon agencies in the name of improving government efficiency. A fired USAID worker noted, for example, how the gleeful destruction of their agency created a situation where four designated Human Resources workers were suddenly left to process 14,000 terminations. One worker in the General Services Administration rued the missed opportunity to meaningfully improve government efficiency. "Yes, let’s make the government more efficient, I'm all for that idea," said this person, who requested anonymity to avoid what is certain to be severe formalized retaliation directed at government workers who speak out. "But this isn't that. This is backwards, the reverse: Replacing one inefficiency with another, even worse one."
At the Park Service, reductions in a force already stretched perilously thin are more likely to be immediately felt by a regular schmo doing some regular summer tourism in, say, Utah. Utah is home to Zion National Park, which lost 11 probationary employees in the purge, the majority of whom were fee booth attendants. The simple-sounding job title misrepresents the complexity of the responsibilities at Zion, where fee booth attendants are essential to the management of access to the 1.1 mile Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel. According to the NPS website, a study from the Federal Highways Administration found that large vehicles physically cannot "negotiate the curves of the tunnel without crossing the center line," a dangerous situation that caused "more and more accidents and near misses in the tunnel due to an immense increase in the volume of traffic and in the size of vehicles passing through the tunnel." As a consequence, rangers are posted at both ends of the tunnel and are assigned to convert two-way tunnel traffic into one-way traffic, for large vehicles. It's a $15 service, managed by the rangers standing sentry and by the ones working the booths, whose job it is to step out and measure large vehicles.
You can see where an arbitrary reduction in force among experienced fee booth attendants would seem ill-advised. "I would not be surprised if we find out sometime this summer that a tractor trailer tried to drive through Zion’s tunnel, got stuck in the middle of it, and closed the entire tunnel for eight hours or more," said the NPS veteran. "In a kind of best-case scenario, no one’s hurt, nothing happens, that’s annoying but fine. But because that is a primary route in and out of Zion, if they have a major medical emergency at that same time, you could imagine this leading to an urgent logistical problem." Even without RVs overturning in the tunnel, understaffed fee booths at Zion and elsewhere will lead to massive backups, already a worsening problem at national parks inundated with long-distance drivers during peak tourism season.
National Park Service staff understand part of their mission to be outreach, connecting the American public with important national resources. "One of the first things that we were told around the inauguration is do not post anything to social media that could be newsworthy," said the NPS veteran, who has been tracking the stark decrease in social media activity from parks' accounts. "I think that maybe part of that was because back in 2017, one of the first things that caught the president’s attention was the number of people attending the inauguration, and how it was more poorly attended than Obama’s. Clearly this time they don’t want to attract any attention within the Trump administration. But so much of our job is outreach and education. How are you supposed to engage with social media now, without it becoming a lightning rod for political controversy and possibly embarrassing the administration? That just becomes really hard for people."
Defector sent emails and requests for comment to the acting Public Affairs Chief for the National Park Service, the National Park Service Public Affairs Office, the Regional Finance Officer who forwarded the guidance to parks about purchasing cards, and the NPS Deputy Director who signed the termination notice sent to the probationary worker, but has not yet received any response. The NPS Office of Communications has distributed to staff a set of guidelines, viewed by Defector, to coordinate communications about the implementation of President Trump's executive orders. This deeply queasy document—among other things, it describes how staff should endeavor to strip any mention of gender identity from applicable federal policies and documents, including using the words "the gay and lesbian community" to replace "LGBTQ+"—notes in bold that even with "approved talking points" only those with access to the designated email inbox should respond to media questions about staffing and hiring.
Just as a matter of brutal political optics, it's ominous that DOGE goons and bloodthirsty appointee freaks don't seem to distinguish between federal agencies that Americans (wrongly, but sincerely) loathe—the IRS, for example—and agencies that Americans broadly support. "That’s one of the reasons why this has really hurt so bad, because if we are in this situation," pondered the NPS veteran, "in one of the most beloved agencies that the federal government has ever created, how much worse must it be if you’re in one of those unloved agencies? Man, we're like one 16th of one penny in the overall federal budget, and yet we're still on the chopping block."
Studies from Pew Research and YouGov show that Americans overwhelmingly hold a favorable opinion of the Park Service, and think of it as well-run. That it should be wrapped up in narratives of bureaucracy, bloat, and wasteful inefficiency is hysterical: Parks attendance has exploded over the last decade, while Park Service staffing, particularly among rangers, has fallen precipitously. The demands on individual workers were unreasonably high even before the agency fell into Elon Musk's crosshairs: NPS staff consistently grade the agency among the crappier places to work in the federal government, putting particular emphasis on low pay, distorted work-life balance, and the lousy performance of senior leadership. The most committed continue to tough it out, year after year, because they believe in the mission. An administration interested in rewarding anything other than ideological conformity and thrall-like personal loyalty might reasonably pounce on the opportunity to give these NPS stalwarts the resources and support they have long lacked. Instead, the Trump administration is pounding the agency even further into the turf.
"It's funny, I never really planned to work for the Park Service," said the fired NPS probationary worker. "I don't have a lot of options, at this point. There aren’t a lot of places out here where I’ve been living where I can pursue my career, because again parks are in pretty remote locations. I’m coming from the public history side, where it’s about caring for the resources, and helping to preserve but also to allow access, for educational purposes, and for researchers, and for public interest. To be a little clichéd: To bring the past alive, in a way. I just never expected to do it for the Park Service, and I guess now I’m not.
"I should've gone into pharmaceuticals."
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