As the Trump administration rushes to reduce spending and eliminate federal jobs, even people working in national parks, among the most beloved and less politicized institutions in the country, are directly in the sight.
Last week, seasonal workers who work in 433 national parks and historical sites, including Yosemite, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, began to receive electronic emails saying that their job offers for the 2025 season had been “terminated”, with little more of explanation.
The measure triggered panic in the ranks of park employees, and threw the vacation plans of hundreds of millions of people visiting the parks every year. In the cutting block there are hundreds, and potentially thousands, of the grapezarks that respond to medical emergencies, as well as the employees of the visitors center and the crews that clean the bathrooms and empty garbage cans.
In many of the largest and most popular parks, seasonal workers exceed permanent employees throughout the year, which makes it difficult to imagine how parks will work without them, according to a supervisory rangers who requested that their name is not used by Fear of reprisals.
“For me, it is unfathomable that we can execute a large park without the stations,” he said. “They are essential; Direct the parks at the operational level. “
In 2021, Yosemite National Park had 741 employees who worked the summer season, compared to 451 in the low winter season, according to the National Parks Service website.
Scott Gediman, a Yosemite spokesman, did not respond to emails and telephone calls requesting comments. The media contacts in the agency's office in Washington, DC, did not respond either.
In addition to 63 parks appointed, nine of which are located in California, more than any other state, the National Parks Service manages another 370 sites, including national monuments, national historical sites and national battlefields. The total earth mass under its supervision is more than 85 million acres.
And they are among the most venerated and beautiful acres in the United States, attracting more than 325 million visitors in 2023.
The emails that rescue the job offers for parks employees seem to be derived from a broader freezing of the Trump administration for federal agencies, part of a coordinated campaign to reduce the federal budget and weaken a bureaucracy (Trump and its supporters call him “deep state”, who says he worked behind the scene to frustrate much of his first period agenda.
While many government agencies are inevitably entangled in the polarizing political warpage of the nation, the parks are among the few public places where people of all stripes can escape. Exhausted by disputes in cable news programs and social networks? Go camp under the stars in Yosemite, or walk between giant trees in sequoia, or see the sun rise on the silent desert in Joshua Tree. What could be more cleaning?
It is certainly not a visit to a bathroom of the National Park this summer, if the freezing of the hiring really remains.
In the previous stops derived from the budget disputes of the Congress or the COVID-19 pandemic, the facilities within the parks deteriorated at an alarming pace. The unauthorized visitors left human feces in the rivers, painted graffiti in pristine cliffs, harassed wild animals and left the bathrooms that looked like “crime scenes,” said the supervisor rangers.
“It is afraid how bad things can be when places are abandoned with anyone looking,” he said.
Apparently lost in politics is how much people sacrifice to take seasonal work that is now rescinded. Many workers organize their entire life around the temporal slots, hoping that they eventually turn them into permanent careers. They do all kinds of side bustles in the low season (ski patrol, driving ambulances, to make sure they are available when they return to the summer tourist season.
When the dreaded emails began to land in their entrance trays last week, many possible workers were fighting, wondering if they needed to cancel travel plans, expel them from leases and align another summer job.
And it is not that the work of the park is a road to wealth. The salary is lower than in many private sector races, and housing costs can be high in remote entry communities at the edges of the parks. People do it because it is the career they have dreamed since they were children.
“We used to joke that they paid us in sunset,” said Phil Francis, president of the coalition to protect the national parks of the United States, which represents more than 3,100 current employees and volunteers and removed from the National Parks Service.
Francis worked for the parks system for 41 years, including periods in Yosemite and Shenondoh National Park, before retiring as Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent in 2013.
“The longer we are in pause, the less likely the parks can open,” Francis said.
It is not just the accumulation of garbage and graffiti that parks supervisors care when they do not have enough employees. It is the safety of visitors. “People hurt, they get lost,” said Francis, so there must be enough rangers to answer: “When things go wrong.”
There is also the economic damage that the many hotels and businesses that depend on park visitors could suffer, and by the families that have already reserved flights, rented cars and made hotels reservations under the assumption that the parks would be open and functional this summer.
Francis said that many of the families who knew during their career saw trips to national parks as a rite of initiation, a way of getting outdoors and celebrating one of the essential joys of being American.
“There are some families that come every year for decades, which make it a tradition,” Francis said.
