Cuts At National Park Service Aren’t About Efficiency

How firing 31 percent of the agency’s staff will cost taxpayers billions, imperil the nation’s natural treasures, and give you the runs

Last week, 1,000 full-time employees at the National Park Service were laid off. Contracts for the agency’s 7,500-strong seasonal workforce are in doubt. Together, that represents about 31 percent of the agency’s total workforce. The Trump administration claims its sweeping reductions in the federal workforce are being done in the name of “government efficiency,” but in National Parks, these cuts will end up costing the government more money than it saves, and will also leave you with a very upset tummy.

The cuts impact all 433 units that the park service manages, and firings have seemingly been done at random, impacting largely “probationary” staff—those who have been in their current positions for less than one or two years. That doesn’t necessarily mean those employees are new hires, workers who have transitioned from contract to full-time employment are included, as are ones who have transferred between departments within the agency.

The terminations were also carried out without notice, which didn’t allow park service management time to prepare. The only locksmith working in Yosemite was let go, for example. They were the only person in that park with keys to the restrooms, so if a visitor gets locked in one of those this week, I guess they’re just shit out of luck.

Speaking of human shit, expect to see a lot more of that on your next visit to a national park. Since many of the service’s pit toilets are maintained by seasonal staff, and it’s a major role for backcountry patrollers—another seasonal position—to bury human feces and remove left-behind toilet paper, that work will currently be left incomplete.

Overflowing or broken toilets and surface shits will then pollute bodies of water, causing algae blooms that kill fish and other wildlife. The resulting spread of bacteria, viruses and parasites into streams and lakes will render fish caught in national park units—which include national seashores—unsafe to eat, and their water dangerous to drink unless boiled, or treated by a speciality filter.

Those filters—I recommend the MSR Guardian—are larger, heavier and more expensive than the designs most backcountry users in North America currently carry, since our backcountry water sources on this continent have typically been free of human waste. Congrats Trump voters, the price of eggs just cost you $400, added 17 ounces to your base weight, and ruined your next fishing trip.

All of this is reminiscent of the impact the extended government shutdown between 2018 and 2019 had on our parks. And, just like the first Trump administration, the park service is currently without a Director. So all of this upheaval is coming at at time in which the agency lacks executive leadership. How will parks cope with sudden and unexpected gaps in staffing? How will they plan for this summer, or next year, or the next decade? What are the goals and priorities agency wide? For the time being, each of those decisions will be left up to the individual park units or be issued by edict straight from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, or come from the White House itself.

That 35 day shutdown—during which 87 percent of park service staff were furloughed—killed multiple visitors and added $11.7 billion to the park service’s maintenance backlog.

We’re talking about an agency which is tasked with managing 132,812.5 square miles of our country’s most pristine and fragile ecosystems. That’s only a little bit smaller than the entire state of Montana. But where my home state operates on an $11 billion annual budget, the park service squeaks by on $3.6 billion a year.

That comparison becomes more stark when you consider that only 12.5 million outsiders venture across Montana’s borders each year, while 325.5 million visited a national park in 2023.

And also unlike most government budgets, the National Park Service is not entirely funded by taxpayers. $151.8 million of that total comes from fees assessed on offshore oil and gas operations. $329.4 million comes from entrance fees. That leaves us with only a little over $3 billion coming out of the federal government’s budget every year.

The administration has yet to quantify the money it thinks it’s going to save with all these firings, forks in the road, and hiring freezes. So let’s rough out an estimate here. The average salary for NPS employees is $61,069. With 1,000 employees fired, that adds up to $61 million. The average seasonal employee at NPS earns $21.39/hour, with a typical contract duration of six months. Assuming a 40-hour weeks across all 7,500 seasonal positions, that’s a potential savings of $167 million. Let’s call the total annual budget saved here at $228 million.

Now let’s continue that bad napkin math into the logical consequences of these cuts. Furloughing 87 percent of NPS employees for 35 days cost taxpayers $11.7 billion. (Which we haven’t even paid for yet, so that amount is increasing every day.) Assuming everything else is equal, which it very much won’t be, eliminating 31 percent of the NPS workforce will cost us $4.1 billion every 35 days. Or $42.8 billion-a-year.

Coincidently, that’s about what Wyoming lawmakers are hoping to net from the sale of Grand Teton National Park.

And the financial hit won’t stop there. On that $3.6 billion annual budget, the park service generates $55.6 billion in total economic output. Things like hotel rooms, tanks of gas, guide services, and groceries really add up. Entire local economies in gateway communities near major parks are wholly dependent on visitor spending. Here in Montana alone, people visiting national parks spent $716 million in 2023.

There’s no data for how much money was lost by gateway communities near national parks during the 2018-2019 shutdown. The last one we have data for was the 16-day shutdown in 2013, which cost those economies $414 million in visitor spending. Again that year, 87 percent of NPS employees were furloughed during the shutdown. So again continuing our very bad math, with 31 percent of NPS employees gone, that adds up to $147 million in lost spending every 16 days, or $3.3 billion annually.

Ultimately, the Trump administration and Republican quislings in Congress are trying to offset $5 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires so they can pass the legislative priorities as part of a budget reconciliation package. The $228 million they hope to save by firing all these park rangers adds up to 0.00456% of that total. Less than a rounding error. Remember that when you come down with explosive diarrhea during your big national park camping trip this summer.

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link. Want to read more articles like this one? Consider supporting independent journalism through a paid subscription.