Trump Is Harming National Parks for Future Generations, Former NPS Director Warns

Jonathan Jarvis ran the U.S. National Park Service under former President Barack Obama. He has serious concerns about the future of public lands under Trump.

In 1976, Jonathan Jarvis began his career in the National Park Service beside a statue of Thomas Jefferson, working as a seasonal interpreter in Washington, D.C., to help visitors understand the historical and natural significance of parks in the nation’s capital. 

Over the next three decades, his roles within the NPS brought him across the country’s public lands—from the lupine-lined trails of Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state to the otherworldly geological formations of Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. In 2009, his path led him back to where he started in D.C.—but this time the scope of his job was far bigger. Under former President Barack Obama, Jarvis served as the country’s 18th director of the NPS for eight years, overseeing the management of more than 85 million acres of public lands. 

Now retired from his post, Jarvis is still keeping an eye on the national parks—and has major concerns about its future under the Trump administration. 

Since President Donald Trump was inaugurated, several executive orders and decisions have targeted public lands, while mass layoffs, voluntary resignations and hiring freezes at the NPS have thrown the agency into disarray. 

Though some positions have been restored, more layoffs reportedly loom. Those still working at the parks have faced budget restrictions on their funding and job reassignments right as the busy season of warmer-weather visits approaches. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has floated downsizing the country’s national monuments and opening up vast swaths of public lands for oil and gas drilling, mining and other development. 

Trump today put forth a budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year that includes a 30 percent cut to the Interior Department’s budget, which could have profound negative impacts on the country’s public lands, experts say. 

On Wednesday, I spoke with Jarvis about his time at the NPS, the growing impacts of climate change on national parks and the threats looming ahead for some of the country’s most pristine and beloved public lands. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

KILEY PRICE: Can you talk to me a little bit about what some of the main jobs are for the parks director, and what your specific goals were when you entered?

JONATHAN JARVIS: When you’re the director of the Park Service, you’re solving the problems that rise up, that have not been solved at some lower level. They land on your lap, particularly problems that have long tenure. I used to call them hardy perennials. They were things like snow machines in Yellowstone or Colorado River water flows—these things that go on for forever and are never necessarily solved, but you’re sort of herding them along in your administration …

Then you’re dealing with emergencies. I was an incident commander on the [Deepwater Horizon] Gulf oil spill for three months of my life. … I was the recovery coordinator for Hurricane Sandy for the department. And so you’re sort of constantly responding to things and you’re doing a lot of personnel hiring, policy kinds of things [and] testifying for legislation that’s pending before Congress, either for or against. You’re fending off a lot of bad ideas. 

PRICE: Do you think that time working your way up through the system to the head of the NPS helped give you perspective for how to run it? 

JARVIS: A lot of folks that come into the directorship from the outside, they really struggle. They struggle with the complexity of the system. The park system goes from the Virgin Islands to Guam and American Samoa, which is on the other side of the dateline. So you’re looking at roughly 17 time zones, [more than] 80 million acres, 320 million visitors and a workforce of 15,000 to 20,000 employees. In any given year there’s going to be a significant number of fatalities by visitors and, unfortunately, occasionally with employees. There’s going to be law enforcement incidents, protests, First Amendment kinds of things going on [and] visits by delegations from all over the world. 

You sort of have to gain some comfort with the ambiguity of the job and … with its complexity. And I do think that folks on the outside don’t really understand how complicated the Park Service really is. 

PRICE: Can you talk to me a little bit about some of the climate impacts that the parks are facing? 

JARVIS: I think my first real recognition of climate change impacts to parks came when I was the superintendent of Mount Rainier National Park. I went there in 1999 and it’s a big mountain, and it has a lot of ice on it, and the glaciers were receding significantly. And some of these glaciers have had long, long-term, decadal monitoring systems on them. So we had a pretty strong record of what was going on. And these glaciers, as they back up, they release a lot of water. Then on top of that, we were seeing a climate shift in the Cascades. 

Historical records would indicate that it turns cold in the fall, you get snow [and] snowpack accumulates. Then in the spring, as it begins to warm, you get rain and that snowpack acts like a great big sponge, catches all that rain and then slowly lets it out. 

Well, what we were seeing was a shift. We’d get the snow in the fall, and then it would warm up, it would rain. And so that rain on that fresh snow would melt it, because it wasn’t very deep pack, and you get these torrential floods. And visitor facilities in the park like campgrounds and picnic areas and trails and roads that had been there for 100 years were getting washed out. So we were seeing this right on the ground, real dramatic change from climate change. 

PRICE: How can NPS respond? 

JARVIS: When I got to Washington, I said, “OK, we’re going to take this on. We’re going to build a climate strategy. We’re going to build a climate office and staff. We’ve hired folks in as our climate specialists. We’re going to focus on these areas, and we’re going to get it out into the field so that the parks that are going through planning processes … are incorporating these principles. We’re going to train our interpreters to talk about climate change. We’re going to green up our operations with renewable vehicles, renewable energy, solar panels, all that kind of stuff. And then we’re going to build a climate monitoring network that will contribute to larger networks of monitoring across the world, frankly.” 

We put a lot of energy and effort into that in the eight years I was in D.C.

PRICE: Were there any moments that really struck you when you started having these climate conversations?

JARVIS: I was down in Everglades National Park, and we were right at the top of the Florida Bay at the Park Service Flamingo site. And you’re literally about two feet above sea level. And we were standing there, and they had had a hurricane that had basically wiped out the Park Service’s facilities. There was a lodge there, there were rental cabins, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. It was all destroyed. 

And I’m standing there with the park superintendent, and he said, “We’re going to rebuild this.” And I said, “No, you’re not. Not in the way it was. You’re going to come up with a way to provide the public the same kind of opportunities they had, but it’s got to be climate resilient.” You’ve got to be able to retreat. You’ve got to be able to either physically move it, or retreat as the sea comes up. 

PRICE: Since Trump was inaugurated, there’s been a lot happening with the national parks. Can you walk me through some of the main moments that you’ve seen where you think that it could shake up the service and the way that it’s been running historically? 

JARVIS: There’s been a cascade of effects without a whole lot of thought as to what their impact would be. It really began with some directives … about even mentioning climate change, or using climate change as a planning tool, or citing climate science. … 

Then the second big impact, sort of operationally, was they froze hiring. And so that stopped our normal operation of hiring our seasonal workforce … the 7,000 to 8,000 employees we hire, generally in January to February, that come on for the summer. They’re kind of the front line. [They’re] interpreters and rangers, maintenance, back country [workers], search and rescue, firefighting, all of that. They stopped that, then they restarted it, so it’s been a mess for a lot of parks. Then they did the “fork in the road,” and then they did the early retirement, and now we’re into the reduction-in-force process. … 

It’s not like you took the top layer off. It’s much more random. Folks that just took the opportunity to go do something else with their lives, or didn’t want to work in this administration, or maybe were eligible to retire, and wanted to go ahead and do it. But it left gaps, holes—very Swiss cheese all over the agency right now. … 

Then there are threats, not yet realized, but there are threats to shut down a lot of the other central offices that provide support to the smaller parks. If you’re a Yellowstone or Yosemite, you’ve got a staff of 400 or 500 and can weather a 10 percent cut. If you’re Carlsbad Caverns, and you have a staff of 30, and you lose 10 people, that’s an operational hit. That means you’re not going to be doing something. 

And then here, a couple weeks ago, the [Interior] secretary put out this order that, you know, the “everything’s fine” … order telling park superintendents to just put your people to work making sure that the visitor cannot see any change, which means that the stuff the visitor doesn’t see, the natural resources, the cultural work, the archeology, the historic preservation, anything that isn’t front and center of the visitor, is going to be set aside, including climate change activity, science monitoring restoration of disturbed sites, monitoring for wildlife activity, all of that kind of stuff. Those folks are cleaning restrooms now.

PRICE: National parks can be an economic boon for communities surrounding them. What do you think some of those trickle-down impacts can be for these gateway communities? And is there any way to measure some of those impacts?

JARVIS: On average, every dollar that the Park Service expends in its operations translates into $4 into the local economy and $10 into the national economy. And the Park Service also hosts about 60 million international visitors. … 

That’s money coming into these gateway communities. Many of them make their entire annual profit in about three months [during] that peak visitor season [with] lodging, restaurants, guides and outfitters, souvenir sales, art. … 

These are communities that live and die on the presence and operation of the park. So I do think there will be [impacts]. Already, we’ve seen the international tourism community say, “We’re not coming to the U.S. for a lot of reasons.” I don’t know domestically whether there will be any dip in visitation. That’s hard to predict. 

PRICE: What do you think might be coming up with the Trump administration as regards to the National Park Service?

JARVIS: I think that this summer will be very revealing in terms of where their impacts have hurt, and unfortunately it’ll play out, I think, in some disasters, probably visitor fatalities, lack of response time, visitor safety incidents, injuries [and] the like. 

I think this is what [the Trump administration staff] don’t understand in part about this, is that the model that has worked for the Park Service, for the country for 100 years, is that we don’t restrict the public from doing things that are high risk. There’s no fence in Yellowstone between you and that bison there. We don’t fence the roads. The bears are not collared. The rattlesnakes are out there in the woods, just like everything else. …

But the model is, we have a visitor center … and if somebody gets in trouble, then we go rescue you. You remove that effort, you remove the response. 

The rangers who are out in the field and stopping at a bear jam in Yellowstone, or talking to the public about staying out of the Merced River [in Yosemite]—you remove that, then you’re subjecting the public to a higher level of risk. And then, bathrooms are not going to get cleaned and trails are not going to be maintained, and the visitor center will be closed because there’s nobody there. … 

Then all the behind-the-scenes stuff that is necessary to park stewardship, including climate monitoring. … So part of it is, if you’re doing a long-term dataset, you’re taking that measurement every month at a particular location. You break that dataset, you basically lower its quality for its ability to be used in decision-making down the road. That’s where I think the long-term effect is going to be, is that we’re undermining our own ability to steward these places for future generations.

On a day-to-day basis, for some parks, the public will not notice any change, but you know, whether or not we are meeting our obligations to the general American public, that these places are being managed for future generations, I don’t know. I think that’s at risk, and we’ll see. 

PRICE: Is there anything you’re optimistic about?

JARVIS: Well, you know, I’m a perennial optimist, and so I think that the Park Service will survive. It has survived previous periods. …   

I think we could be looking at some sort of potential renaissance of the service [and] of the agency down the road. Because there is a groundswell of support among the American people. They love their parks. … And I think in the agency itself, there’s some really wonderful young people in the agency that will stay on. They will not be fired. They will persist. They will persevere, and they will rise up in the organization and into the leadership. The Park Service attracts a lot of great talent, highly educated and highly motivated people, and I think they will stick it out. 

Then there’ll be a period of rejuvenation, and maybe it might look a little bit different than it has in the past. I mean, my hope has always been that they get the Park Service out of the Department of Interior and stand it up as an independent agency. …

The Interior has shown they are unworthy of managing these places. They are too focused on energy, fossil fuel mining [and] development. When they come in, particularly when the Republicans come in, this is all they focus on. In the past, they basically ignored the Park Service. This time they’re decimating it, and that’s really not the covenant that we have with the American people. These places are to be managed so your children can go to the Grand Canyon, and your children’s children can see it. 

The Department of Interior and the National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment about how much of the NPS workforce has been lost since the start of 2025, if there are future layoff plans and if NPS will continue to run its Climate Change Response Program. 

Cover photo:  Jonathan Jarvis stood in the West Village of Manhattan following former President Barack Obama's executive order declaring The Stonewall Inn—a landmark of the historic gay rights movement—as a National Monument. Credit: Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images