“I essentially crowdsourced the information from hundreds, possibly thousands, of park rangers who chipped in for providing information on their own park,” they wrote in an email to SFGATE. “I have put in dozens of hours of my own time to accumulate this information within the past week,” the ranger added. “I truly believe this information should be seen by the general public.”
A rogue ranger is documenting every National Park Service firing
There is now a running tally on the 'Valentine's Day Massacre'
In an act of resistance, park rangers are banding together to crowdsource terminations and catalog the number of National Park Service employees the Trump administration has fired in every park unit across the country.
The rangers want the public to know how many people got fired on Feb. 14 in what’s being called the “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” says one seasonal park ranger who is leading the charge. The ranger requested anonymity to protect their job, which was granted in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy.
The ranger gathered the information from three groups of Park Service employees on social media and then double-checked with rangers at each site to validate the numbers.
It’s been widely reported that roughly 1,000 permanent Park Service employees in their “probationary” period were fired earlier this month. “Probationary” isn’t a measure of job performance; it refers to employees who are new hires in their first one or two years of employment or longer-term employees who recently transitioned to a new position. An estimated 4,700 more employees were terminated at other public land management agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, which includes the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But numbers in individual national parks are hard to come by. Spokespeople for several national parks referred SFGATE’s questions about the rangers’ list and numbers of fired employees to the National Park Service Office of Communications. The office replied with a statement that didn’t answer any questions. “The National Park Service is hiring seasonal workers to continue enhancing the visitor experience as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management,” the Park Service press team wrote. “We are focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks.”
“The official list that OPM likely contains has not been made public and likely will never be public, so us park rangers decided to make one ourselves,” the ranger wrote, referring to the Office of Personnel Management.
Together, park rangers say they’ve collaboratively verified more than 750 of those firings in the past week and a half. Some parks lost just one employee, while Shenandoah National Park and Everglades National Park, for example, lost 15 each, according to the document.
Jeff Mow, the superintendent of Glacier National Park between 2013 and 2022, called the terminations “indiscriminate” and “very uneven.” “It’s so chaotic,” Mow said.
The spreadsheet does not include job offers that the Trump administration rescinded, seasonal positions that were frozen or vacant positions that have gone unfilled. The spreadsheet also doesn’t include more than 700 National Park Service employees who responded to the “Fork in the Road” email with their resignations.
There are some discrepancies between the ranger-curated list and numbers reported by other outlets. The Associated Press, for example, reported that 16 people were fired from Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. But the ranger-compiled list has only four terminations.
The ranger noted the crowdsourced spreadsheet is “ever evolving” and receiving new information daily. “It’s as accurate of a list [as] one could possibly be for crowdsourced information,” the ranger wrote in an email.
Yosemite National Park, where demonstrators suspended an upside-down American flag from a mountaintop last weekend in protest, lost nine employees, according to the spreadsheet. That includes the only locksmith on staff. The spreadsheet notes the total was originally 11, but two rangers got their jobs back.
The park — already in chaos from the firings, rescinded job offers and a hiring freeze — is delaying the sale of summertime reservations for several popular campgrounds.
Joshua Tree National Park lost six, according to the document, and prominent national parks in Montana and Wyoming also saw terminations in the single digits. According to the list, Grand Teton National Park lost four employees, and Glacier National Park lost two, with a third employee initially terminated but already reinstated.
The spreadsheet occasionally provides more detailed information on the job duties of those terminated. One position axed in Glacier includes a museum specialist, a position that involves caring for cultural artifacts, natural history specimens and archives, according to a Department of the Interior job posting.
Former superintendent Mow said parks like Glacier may be impacted by additional layoffs in surrounding lands, including national forests. Glacier, for example, works in tandem with public land management agencies and tribes nearby to respond to wildfires. “Glacier National Park does not have the staff to put people out on 17 separate lightning strikes,” he said.
When nearby trail crews are decimated, or the Forest Service doesn’t hire seasonal workers who sometimes chip in on fires, that can have a ripple effect on national parks nearby, even if their own staffing remains mostly intact. “It could result in more closures of the park during fire season,” Mow said. Thousands of Forest Service employees were also fired Feb. 14, although a small number of people are beginning to be rehired, according to E&E News.
The spreadsheet reports that Yellowstone National Park — America’s first national park — lost seven employees. Meanwhile, parks in Washington and Oregon also saw relatively low numbers of layoffs, according to the document. Olympic National Park lost five employees, North Cascades National Park lost six, and Crater Lake National Park lost one. Mount Rainier National Park clocked the most terminations, with 10 listed in the spreadsheet.
As for the most popular parks in the Southwest, Grand Canyon National Park lost 10 employees, Zion National Park lost 11, and Bryce Canyon lost two, according to the spreadsheet.
As park tourism ramps up for spring break and the busy summer season, it remains unclear how terminations will impact visitors’ experiences and the protection of natural resources. Remaining employees say they are bracing themselves for an onslaught of visitors, abundant trash, widespread closures and public safety hazards. They are also organizing another round of protests across the country to take place March 1.
Cover photo: A rogue ranger is documenting every National Park Service firing. Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst N/Getty Images
