Chaotic Moment for National Parks, Forest Service as Staff Cuts Threaten Public Lands Management

Thousands of federal employees have been laid off at agencies dedicated to conserving U.S. public lands.

For Stuart Garbett, clocking into the office in the summer meant traversing the sprawling, mountainous terrain of the Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming. As a seasonal wilderness ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, he spent his days clearing fallen trees and trash from trails, inspecting outfitter camps and ensuring visitors were steering clear of the region’s thriving grizzly bear population. 

Last week, Garbett was in the midst of preparations for another season when he got an email from the Forest Service saying all probationary employees—typically the recently hired or promoted—were on a list requested by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. That included him. He was told not to worry. 

Then, last Friday, he was fired. 

“This was the first year that I was getting a permanent job,” Garbett told me. He stressed that he was the only wilderness ranger for an area of over half a million acres. “It’s a pretty big bummer.”

Garbett was among thousands of employees laid off last week at the Forest Service and National Parks Service, which collectively oversee 278 million acres of land in the U.S. The slash is part of wider, often chaotic mass layoffs in the federal government to “maximize efficiency and productivity,” according to an executive order President Donald Trump issued on Feb. 11. 

The two agencies have already taken hits in recent years, freezing many seasonal positions due to budget cuts. At the same time, visitor numbers reached record highs, and park managers fear staff is stretched too thin to adequately maintain the landscapes, particularly after the recent purge. 

Following backlash from job cut decisions, the Department of the Interior committed this week to hiring thousands of seasonal employees at national parks to deal with staffing shortages. But the staff cuts across a variety of agencies could still have widespread negative consequences for the country’s public lands, experts say. 

Sweeping Layoffs: The number of terminations since Trump was inaugurated isn’t clear. But data platform Statista tallied it at more than 16,000, with new announcements every day. Reuters reported that 75,000 federal employees have agreed to deferred resignations the administration is calling “buyouts.” The layoffs permeate dozens of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Veterans Affairs. 

The Trump administration has gutted many of the agencies responsible for managing and conserving public lands like the NPS and the Forest Service, which falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Layoffs have affected rangers like Garbett and trail crew, as well as endangered species biologists, engineers and geologists. Many federal employees were told that they were being fired due to “poor performance” despite receiving only positive feedback in yearly reviews. The New York Times handed the mic to former employees in a recent episode of The Daily podcast, if you want to hear more of their stories. 

Many of the laid-off staff are newer to federal service. However, the process of securing a federal environment-related job often takes a long time—and firing these employees means losing the knowledge they bring with them, said Taal Levi, an associate professor at Oregon State University. 

“There’s a lot of expertise in the young people that have just gotten their jobs and lost it, and they put in a lot of years into getting that expertise through bachelor’s, master’s, Ph.D., postdoc, finally get a federal job,” Levi told me. He often collaborates with the Forest Service on wildlife research. “Then that’s it. That was going to be their job for life, and they sacrificed their career and income for all of their 20s … and half their 30s, so they’re not saving for retirement at all that time.”

Experts say the fallout from these staffing shortages could be catastrophic for public lands and the people and wildlife that rely on them. Visitors at California’s Yosemite National Park, Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park and Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania have already reported longer wait times to get in, reservation cancellations and bathroom lockouts, The Washington Post reports. 

“It’s chaos everywhere,” Kristin Jenn, a former seasonal park ranger at Alaska’s Denali National Park & Preserve, told the Post. “I don’t know what the next couple of months are going to bring.”

The fallout of this confusion could extend beyond government land. National parks are a major economic boon for the communities that surround them, often in rural areas. An NPS report published last year found that 4.5 million visitors to Yellowstone National Park in 2023 spent $623 million in communities near the park. 

With fewer staff to help manage parks, visitorship could go down, experts say. In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the NPS staff cuts, and said that the agency is “in the process right now of posting 5,000 summer jobs.” 

Park advocates celebrated the hiring news, which was announced first last week, but stressed that parks will likely still be understaffed. The National Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the job cuts. 

The Forest Service is also facing challenges. Over Presidents’ Day weekend, the agency cut an estimated 3,400 employees, about 10 percent of its workforce. While the layoffs did not include staff wildland firefighters, many of the employees who were axed were involved in fire mitigation and recovery and were sometimes pulled in to serve on the line during fire season, ABC News reports. For his part, Garbett often cleared burned trees or maintained trails after flames carved through Bridger-Teton National Forest.  

“It takes about two years for a trail to disappear if you have bad weather, fires and all that kind of stuff, which is becoming more common,” he said. 

What About Wildlife? It’s not just people who could be impacted by the recent staff cuts and budget slashing at the agencies responsible for managing public lands. Across the U.S., the national parks system hosts more than 600 endangered or threatened plants and animals—from the Cape Sable seaside sparrow in Florida’s Everglades National Park to the Olympic marmot in Washington’s Olympic National Park. 

“This is what a lot of people come [to parks] to see,” Bart Melton, senior program director for wildlife at the National Parks Conservation Association, told The San Francisco Chronicle. “We need to be making sure the bison, the bears, the butterflies are there in the future. But if the biologists aren’t there, this is not guaranteed.”

One of these biologists is Andria Townsend, who was the supervisory carnivore specialist at Yosemite National Park in California until she got fired last week, the Chronicle reports. She managed a program that monitors the endangered Pacific fisher, a rare weasel that lives in the park (scientists estimate there are only 150 left in the Sierra Nevada). Townsend fears that the program will no longer continue, which could hinder efforts to protect them. 

A similar issue is playing out with the threatened northern spotted owl, which lives along the northwest coast. The bird has faced steep population declines due to logging and competition with invasive barred owls. The Forest Service runs a program based on Oregon State University’s campus to monitor the birds using audio recorders scattered throughout the region. But now, there likely will not be enough seasonal workers to install the recorders, which will hinder data collection and research that guides conservation efforts, Levi says. 

When asked for comment on the monitoring program, the USDA’s Pacific Northwest Research Station said staffers were working on a response but “have a high volume of requests at this time.”

“We cannot get a good estimate of what’s going on with owls this year [and] where they are,” Levi says. “It hurts the ability to monitor spotted owls in the long term and look at any places that are having local extinction or local colonization, and then what’s driving those dynamics.” 

Cover photo:  Rangers and federal staff at Yosemite National Park in California are crucial for national park maintenance and public land conservation. Credit: David Calvert via Getty Images