Elon Musk’s DOGE Sowing Chaos In National Park Service

Personnel files disappear and seasonal jobs cancelled as “Fork in the Road” email upends NPS staffing

An administrator at a major national park tells me that seasonal hires are being cancelled, and personnel files for full time staff have “disappeared” from government servers, calling into question the employments status of thousands of National Park Service workers. Those moves come as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to Office of Personal Management computer servers and U.S. Treasury payment systems.

The administrator, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, says they’re “terrified and anxious,” not just for their own job, but for the impacts these moves will have on the park service, and the natural wonders it protects.

Each summer, as visitation booms, NPS hires over 7,500 seasonal workers to augment its 20,000-strong full-time staff. President Trump announced a “freeze” on federal hiring as part of his day one executive orders, but U.S. Office of Personnel Management guidelines specifically exempted “traditionally recurring” seasonal jobs from that mandate.

It’s part of the administrator’s role to write the job descriptions and manage the hiring process for seasonal workers at the park they help manage. They tell me that process begins each fall, and usually concludes in the winter. They’ve already filled many of the hundreds of positions needed to staff park operations this summer, but those hires were this week notified that those jobs had been cancelled.

An email originally sent on January 30th, and forwarded to me reads:

“Dear [seasonal worker],

Please be advised that the National Park Service is unable to fill the Recreation Fee Technician, GS-0503-S position at [national park name and job location] at this time. As such, your job offer has been rescinded at management request.

Should the bureau be able to fill the position again, another announcement will be posted in due course. Thank you for your continued Federal employment. You are encouraged to visit http://usajobs.gov to view Federal employment opportunities.

Sincerely,

[name]

National Park Service”

I’ve transcribed rather than screen capped the email to avoid inadvertently disclosing any identifying information. AltNationalPark service, a social media account that frequently shares agency scuttlebutt, reports that the Trump administration may be using unique “fingerprints” hidden in emails to catch leakers.

Neither NPS nor the Department of the Interior responded immediately to requests for comment. At the time of writing there are seven openings for seasonal NPS positions on USAJobs.Gov, less than 1/10th of a percent of the total needed.

I called Jonathan Jarvis, who served as the Director of the National Park Service under the Obama administration. “The seasonal workforce has been a core function of the Park Service for over 100 years,” he told me. “Seasonal hires do everything from cleaning restrooms to fighting fires to backcountry patrol, and they’ve become increasingly important due to the high levels of visitation.”

Jarvis explains that January and February are what he calls, “the critical hiring window,” and that, should NPS fail to fill these necessary positions by then, they may struggle to fill them at all.

“Many people don’t realize that the Park Service can only hire American citizens,” he says. NPS cannot legally take advantage of J-1 visa programs, or other types of international hiring to fill seasonal roles. And due to both the high cost of living and remote locations of many of America’s most popular parks, Jarvis fears workers qualified to perform essential work like clearing Glacier National Park’s Going to the Sun Road of snow, may “move on,” should hiring recommence at some future date.

A seasonal worker clears snow from Logan Pass on Glacier’s Going to the Sun Road. It’s unclear if that work will be able to take place this year.

The administrator has the same concern, telling me that they don’t know how they could fill all the necessary positions in time for the May 1st date when most seasonal roles begin at parks nationwide.

But hundreds of jobs going vacant are just the start of the problems the administrator is facing. They say they originally joined NPS over a decade ago because they believe in the service’s mission to preserve natural and cultural resources for “this and future generations.”

“I just always really wanted to live and work in a national park,” they told me during a phone call. Over the last decade, they’ve been able to do that in four different units across the country. And they’ve excelled at what they describe as a “low paying” role, always receiving a five-out-of-five on performance evaluations, and earning sometimes two cash bonuses a year as a result. Between the ability to work four ten hour shifts a week, do most of those from home, and the job benefits that provide healthcare for them and their two children, they’ve found it to be a rewarding career.

But that career started to feel fragile on January 20th, when Trump signed an executive order mandating five days a week of in-office work.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” the administrator told me. “With the cost of living near parks being what it is, most employees live a long ways away and commute in. Doing that four days a week with longer shifts instead of five is just more efficient.”

And then there’s the cost of childcare. “That costs more than what I make,” the administrator complained. With two kids, their federal job nets them less per-week than what childcare would cost. They cannot afford to work full-time from the office.

Word of the executive orders created what the administrator describes as an environment of “fear,” among their colleagues. They say no one’s talking on social media or through official channels, saving that for face-to-face meetings outside the office instead.

And then came that “Fork in the Road,” email from OPM. Aping the exact words used in an email Musk sent to Twitter staff shortly after he acquired that company and laid off 80 percent of its workforce, the email offered deferred resignation to any federal employee who responded with the single word “resign,” and suggested that anyone remaining should be “loyal.” Its stated purpose was, “encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

The administrator was dumbfounded. They’re part of a small team managing a park with hundreds of employees and a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, but don’t even get paid enough to cover child care. Like other national parks, theirs turns that relatively small budget into a massive return by realizing hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer spending each year in gateway communities.

“The position I now hold is the consolidation of three different jobs that existed when I started,” they told me. “What about any of this is not productive?!”

When summer hires began to forward their notices of contract cancellation on January 30th, feelings of fear from colleagues at their park took a turn for the worse.

“One of my colleagues told me I should log onto my personnel file, and preserve records of my job performance,” the administrator explained. “As a federal employee, we have significant protections, they can only fire us for bad performance.”

But, when they tried to log onto the OPM server, it wouldn’t let them in. “I tried to reset my password and everything,” they said. But they’re still locked out, as are many of their colleagues. That’s when they called me.

“I’m worried they’re trying to set up a scenario where they can say there’s no evidence for me performing well,” they told me.

“Payroll processes on Tuesday, but my bank pays me early for each paycheck, and I got mine on Friday,” they explain. “For the next pay period? I don’t know.”

They say their boss has called an all-hands meeting for Monday, and they hope to learn more then. As far as they’re concerned, they still have a job. But doing what? “Right now, I should be staffing up and managing seasonal hires,” they explain.

I did ask about the worst case scenario. “Without my team, no one at [park name] is going to get paid,” they said. “No one is getting housing or job assignments.”

I ran all this past Jarvis. “320 million people are going to be showing up at our national parks come summer, no matter if Trump manages to staff them or not,” the former Director told me. “And if they’re not ready, there’s going to be a lot of problems.”

This conversation felt eerily reminiscent of ones Jarvis and I were having back in 2018 and 2019, when a 35-day government shutdown saw parks remain open, even as staff stayed home. The result? Visitors died, park resources and natural features were damaged, and a park service-wide maintenance backlog that had stood at an already overwhelming $11.6 billion swelled to $23.3 billion. The entire NPS budget is $3.8 billion annually.

“The park service already operates with bare bone staffing,” Jarvis told me. Any cuts would have, “tremendous consequences,” he said.

Reuters reports that, on Friday, “Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.”

The New York Times reports, “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday.”

The administrator asks, “No one voted for him, he’s not even American, why are we letting him destroy our National Park Service?"

Top photo: NPS

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.