The National Park Service is facing an all-out crisis after losing roughly 24% of its full-time staff to a series of brutal cuts and redundancies imposed by the Trump administration.
Visitors to the parks have been forced to contend with long lines, reduced opening hours, and other issues as parks across the country struggle to cope without sufficient staff. Conservation and scientific efforts have also been impacted as employees are forced to perform various visitor-facing roles and clean the bathrooms, due to a lack of maintenance staff.
To find out just how bad things have gotten, I caught up with John Garder, Senior Director of Budget and Appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association.
The NPCA is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to protecting America's National Parks and their staff.
What happened?
The past few months have been extremely damaging for the NPS.
Days after taking office, President Trump announced a federal hiring freeze, which stopped America's 63 national parks from recruiting the thousands of temporary workers they rely on each year during the busy summer season, and asked full-time employees to take redundancy.
Weeks later, one thousand further staff were fired in a bulk email, popularly referred to as the 'Valentine's Day massacre'.
In total, internal NPS data reported by NPCA suggests that the parks have lost almost a quarter of their full-time staff, and have only hired around half of the usual number of temporary employees.
Visitor experience
Inadequate staff numbers have had a drastic impact on the visitor experience at America's 63 national parks.
"We are seeing late openings of campgrounds, long lines at the visitor centre, challenges keeping up with maintenance, reduced hours at parks, reduced hours at visitor centres, and other impacts," Garder explains.
Delays have been a common occurrence throughout the summer. Parks across the country are recording record visitor numbers, but without ample staff to man the facilities, some visitors have been forced to wait in lengthy lines before they can even get through the gate.
To make up for the missing maintenance workers, Garder claims that law enforcement officers, scientists, and other non-public-facing staff have been forced away from their usual work to help visitors.
"We're seeing a situation where there are professional staff who care for resources, who do scientific work, who perform law enforcement, and are needed for their normal duties, who are now maintaining bathrooms, and are doing some of the other work so that visitors don't see the impact that this is having," he tells me.
Internal NPS emails seen by SFGate appear to confirm Garder's claims, asking biologists, hydrologists, and archaeologists at Yosemite National Park to take on bathroom shifts due to insufficient staff numbers.
Garder continues: "The long-term threat, which is very alarming, is not necessarily visible to park visitors, but if this keeps up, this eventually is going to be the case as resources get degraded."
Conservation
With conservation staff forced elsewhere to deal with other, 'collateral duties', Garder fears that their vital work monitoring wildlife, addressing invasive species, and restoring habitats is in danger.
"All of those things are at risk as professionals are being lost, and those staff who remain are, in many cases, being sent to perform other duties, many of which are visitor-facing," he explains.
Multiple conservation employees have also lost work in Trump's mass firings, and many more have taken the administration's redundancy package.
Campsites
Campsites are one of the few areas where the parks are just about coping. Although multiple sites were unable to open on time earlier in the summer, the rehiring of some seasonal staff has lifted the burden.
"As they've been able to hire more seasonal staff, which is not at the level that the Interior Secretary promised, they have been able to do more things like open up campgrounds," says Garder.
What's next?
The future of America's national parks remains in the balance, but there's a possibility that things could get even worse before they get better.
In June, President Trump's Interior Secretary Doug Burgum proposed a whopping $1.2 billion cut to the NPS in its 2026 budget proposal to Congress.
The announcement sent a shudder through the outdoor community. The NPS already has a monster deferred maintenance backlog of over $20 billion, and nature lovers feared that it wouldn't be able to cope with just two-thirds of its 2025 budget.
Congress, thankfully, listened to the budget's many critics, and a House appropriations subcommittee recently marked it up with a restored NPS budget of $3.1 billion, which would essentially keep funding the same as this year.
"We're relieved to see that Congress is declining some of the administration's worst proposals, at least so far," says Garder, who remains deeply concerned about the service's future under the Trump administration.
"The Interior Secretary has engaged in a steady, all-out assault on the National Park Service," he claims.
"This is historic in nature, and we're alarmed by it. It's important that Americans continue to demonstrate outrage, and the administration and Congress listen to them."
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