As Trump cuts federal jobs, even national parks are on the chopping block

As the Trump administration rushes to cut spending and eliminate federal jobs, even the people who work at the national parks — among the country’s most beloved and least politicized institutions — find themselves directly in the crosshairs.

Last week, the seasonal workers who staff 433 national parks and historical sites, including Yosemite, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, began receiving emails saying their job offers for the 2025 season had been “rescinded,” with little further explanation.

The move set off panic in the ranks of park employees, and threw into limbo the vacation plans of hundreds of millions of people who visit the parks each year. On the chopping block are hundreds — and potentially thousands — of park rangers who respond to medical emergencies, as well as visitor center employees and the crews that clean bathrooms and empty garbage cans.

In many of the larger and most popular parks, seasonal workers outnumber year-round permanent employees, making it hard to imagine how the parks will function without them, according to one supervising ranger who asked that her name not be used for fear of retaliation.

“To me, it’s unfathomable that we would be able to run a large park without the seasonals,” she said. “They’re essential; they run the parks on an operational level.”

In 2021, Yosemite National Park had 741 employees working the summer season, compared with 451 in the winter off-season, according to the National Park Service website.

Scott Gediman, a spokesman for Yosemite, did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment. Media contacts at the agency’s Washington, D.C., office also did not respond.

In addition to 63 named parks — nine of which are in California, more than any other state — the National Park Service administers 370 other sites, including national monuments, national historic sites and national battlefields. The total land mass under its supervision is more than 85 million acres.

And they are among the most revered and beautiful acres in the United States, drawing more than 325 million visitors in 2023.

The emails rescinding job offers for parks employees appear to stem from a broader Trump administration hiring freeze for federal agencies, part of a coordinated campaign to slash the federal budget and weaken a bureaucracy — Trump and his supporters call it the “deep state” — that he claims worked behind the scenes to thwart much of his first-term agenda.

While many government agencies are unavoidably enmeshed in the nation’s polarizing political tug of war, the parks are among the few public places where people of all stripes can escape. Exhausted by the bickering on cable news shows and social media feeds? Go camp beneath the stars in Yosemite, or stroll among the giant trees in Sequoia, or watch the sun rise over the silent desert in Joshua Tree. What could be more cleansing?

Certainly not a visit to a national park bathroom this summer, if the hiring freeze indeed holds.

In previous shutdowns stemming from congressional budget disputes or the COVID-19 pandemic, facilities inside the parks deteriorated at an alarming rate. Unauthorized visitors left human feces in rivers, painted graffiti on once pristine cliffs, harassed wild animals and left the toilets looking like “crime scenes”, the supervising ranger said.

“It’s just scary how bad things can get when places are abandoned with nobody watching,” she said.

Seemingly lost in the politics is how much people sacrifice to take the seasonal jobs now being rescinded. Many workers organize their whole lives around the temporary slots, hoping eventually to turn them into permanent careers. They do all kinds of side hustles in the off-season — ski patrol, driving ambulances — to make sure they are available when the summer tourist season comes around again.

As the dreaded emails started landing in their inboxes last week, many would-be workers were left scrambling, wondering if they needed to cancel travel plans, wriggle out of leases and line up other summer employment.

And it’s not like the park jobs are a path to riches. The pay is lower than in many private sector careers, and housing costs can be sky-high in remote gateway communities on the edges of the parks. People do it because it’s the career they’ve dreamed of since they were kids.

“We used to joke that we got paid in sunsets,” said Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, which represents over 3,100 current, former and retired employees and volunteers of the National Park Service.

Francis worked for the parks system for 41 years, including stints at Yosemite and Shenandoah National Park, before retiring as superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway in 2013.

“The longer we’re on pause, the less probable it is that the parks are going to be able to open,” for the peak summer season, Francis said.

It’s not just the build-up of trash and graffiti that parks supervisors worry about when they don’t have enough employees. It’s the safety of the visitors. “People get hurt, they get lost,” Francis said, so there have to be enough rangers on hand to respond, “when things go wrong.”

There’s also the economic damage that could be suffered by the many hotels and businesses that rely on park visitors, and by the families who have already booked flights, rented cars and made hotel reservations on the assumption the parks would be open and functional this summer.

Francis said many of the families he met during his career saw trips to the national parks as a rite of passage, a way to get outdoors and celebrate one of the essential joys of being an American.

“There are some families who come every year for decades, who make it a tradition,” Francis said.