A Comprehensive Guide To National Parks During The Government Shutdown
Official insights from the updated NPS contingency plan, and the analysis you need to understand it
National Parks, the rural communities that rely on them, and the people employed to protect them are uniquely vulnerable to government shutdowns. The amount of harm that will ultimately result from the lapse in funding is determined by two factors the government has control over—duration and management—and two they don’t—visitor behavior and weather. With the shutdown now in effect, National Park Service just released its contingency plan. Here’s what you need to know.
Should You Still Visit A National Park?
I’m putting this first because groups that advocate for national parks, and the rangers themselves are very clear on this: no.
Even if you plan to pack out your own trash and human waste. Even if you’re an experienced outdoorsperson whose risk of injury or accident is minimal. Even if you have the best possible intentions. The footprint your visit will create will still, in a best possible case, increase the workload for the 2,500 to 3,100 staff now tasked with managing all 85 million acres of NPS sites, which during normal times would be receiving well in excess of two million visitors per-day.
In a worst case scenario, one in which you need to fall back on assistance provided by emergency services, you will find those staff members—all of whom are currently working without pay—overwhelmed. If and when they are able to come to your aid, doing so will happen at the expense of helping someone else.
If you care about national parks and the people who protect them and their visitors, the best thing you can do right now to support them is stay away.
How Many Staff Have Been Furloughed?
One of the interesting things about this contingency plan, which seems to have been developed yesterday(!), is that, for the first time since DOGE began its mass firings of national park employees and other government workers, we’re seeing a total number of workers still at the agency: 14,500 to 15,500. Before January 20th, that number was around 20,000.
These numbers track with the ~24% reduction figure reported by the National Parks Conservation Association.
According to the contingency plan, the number of NPS staff “necessary to protect life and property,” totals 2,500 to 3,100.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that 12,000 total staff were furloughed this morning. The contingency plan contains a measure authorizing the use of both entrance fee accounts and third-party funding to maintain some non-emergency service park operations.
This necessitates talk of two different categories of essential employee: Excepted and exempted.
An excepted role include those, “necessary to protect life and property, activities expressly authorized by law, and activities necessarily implied by law,” according to the plan. Such jobs are:
Law enforcement and emergency response;
Border and coastal protection and surveillance
Fire suppression for active fires, emergency stabilization, or staffing commensurate with Preparedness Level conditions;
Protection of Federal lands, buildings, waterways, equipment, and other property within the National Park System, including research property;
Activities essential to ensure continued public health and safety, including safe use of food and drugs and safe use of hazardous materials, drinking water, and sewage treatment operation;
Activities that ensure production of power and maintenance of the power distribution system;
Activities related to United States Park Police annuity benefits transfer (necessarily implied by law, 54 U.S.C. 103101(d));
Activities related to facilitation of First Amendment activities including permitting and monitoring (necessarily implied by law, U.S. Const, Amend I); and
Activities necessary to oversee or support excepted or exempted activities, including budget, finance, procurement, communications, human resources, and information technology services.
That last point is worth talking about, because White House budget director Russell Vought is threatening to permanently RIF all furloughed employees, and has authorized staff developing and implementing that program to remain working through the shutdown.
Those are the employees that will continue to work—albeit without pay—throughout the duration of the shutdown, and the activities they will be authorized to perform.
In addition to those excepted roles, the contingency plan also allows for exempted employees to continue work on some park operations. Even though these employees will also be working without pay, performing their jobs requires a budget, and that will be drawn from entry fee accounts and third party funding.
Exempted roles include include facilities maintenance, toilet pumping, trash pickup, and the management of those functions.
The operation of park entrances and the collection of fees is neither excepted or exempted in the contingency plan. So, fee collection halted at midnight last night. Whatever money is currently in fee accounts, or being held by regional park offices has now started counting down towards zero. And while the plan allows individual parks to run down their own accounts, and request funds from their regions, once that money is gone, any activity funded by recreation fees will cease when that money runs out, and the contingency plan clarifies that employees asked to perform excempted work at the beginning of the shutdown will be subjected to furlough as accounts run dry.
That’s one major reason why the harm caused to national parks will increase as the shutdown continues.
External entities like state, local and tribal governments can opt to use their own non-reimbursable funds to cover exempted activities. The state of Utah, for instance, has stated it plans to do this in order to retain the economic activity from park visitation it relies on.
Which Parks Are Open?
“As a general rule, if a facility or area is locked or secured during non-business hours (buildings, gated parking lots, etc.) it should be locked or secured for the duration of the shutdown,” directs the contingency plan.
Most outdoor park sites and attractions will remain accessible to the public. But remember that the national park service administers 433 total sites, and those include ones that are primarily indoor museums, and even ones that are underground. Expect visitor centers, museums, and historic buildings to be closed even in parks that otherwise remain open. The underground portions of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky and Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico will similarly be inaccessible to the public.
What About My Reservation?
Some hospitality functions inside national parks are run by third party concessioners. Where those remain accessible, the contingency plan allows for them to continue operations as normal.
The Yellowstone, for instance, this means that lodges, restaurants, gift shops, and the restrooms and services within them, “will be open and welcoming guests and visitors from around the world,” according to their operator, Xanterra.
At Recreation.gov, which handles bookings for campgrounds and permitted trails and other activities in national parks and on other forms of public land, visitors are met with a pop-up that reads:
The Recreation.gov website will remain operational during the Federal government lapse-in-funding period. Depending on agency operations, you may not be able to complete a reservation for any time in the future or complete a purchase for some passes during the lapse-in-funding period.
Depending on agency operations, if you have a reservation at a location that closes and your reservation is canceled, you’ll receive an email with more information. Some locations will be closed and will not provide an email update.
Because communications are not an excepted or exempted activity, you cannot expect to find any official or reliable sources of information about the status of a park or any attraction or service within one not administered by a concessioner.
Campground operations are listed by the contingency plan as an excempted activity. But whether or not a site you’ve reserved in advance will be available is very much up in the air, as is the state of that campground.
How Much Damage Will Occur?
With exempted employees still performing some maintenance, and early fall weather still mild, initial damage to park infrastructure, natural features, and historic artifacts will be limited. But that will change with time. As funds begin to run low, parks will be forced to pull back on maintenance. And, as excepted employees performing law enforcement and and emergency services begin to get overwhelmed, visitor behavior will begin to go unchecked.
Should the shutdown become prolonged, such as the last one which ran 35 days between late 2018 and early 2019, and if that combines with any sort of extreme weather, we could begin to see drastic impacts.
Another major factor is visitor behavior. Again we’re talking about 433 total park sites, in every state, covering 85 million total acres. And around 3,000 staff charged with protecting all that. Invariably people are going to take this as an opportunity to misbehave. How bad will that get is anyone’s guess, but we’re not exactly living through a time in which there’s a broad sense of shared social purpose.
The contingency plan acknowledges this, and creates a process through which park resources can be protected:
At the Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks’ discretion, parks may close grounds/areas with sensitive natural, cultural, historic, or archaeological resources vulnerable to destruction, looting, or other damage that cannot be adequately protected by the excepted or exempted law enforcement staff that remain on duty.
That Assistant Secretary is Kevin Lilly, an investment banker from Houston tapped by interior secretary Doug Burgum to assist in his effort to move the park system towards sell offs and privatized operations. Lilly has no experience with parks or anything similar, but in the absence of a Senate-confirmed Director of the National Park Service, is tasked with administering the entire agency. Whether or not Lilly is responsive to the concerns of individual parks and their employees, and what his motivations in deciding whether or not to protect park resources may be are big unknowns that, should the shutdown become prolonged, may ultimately decide the fate of many irreplaceable park features, fragile ecosystems, and aging infrastructure.
Top photo: NPS
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It’s disgusting what the coward republicans and the heritage foundation are doing to our crown jewel.
NPCA will be looking for a new CEO soon, you should apply.