Last year, the National Park Service lost about a quarter of its previously 20,000-strong workforce to reductions in force, early retirements, and buyouts. But that didn’t go far enough for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who tried to use last fall’s 43-day government shutdown as a mechanism for eliminating staff at regional NPS offices. A federal judge ultimately stopped that from happening, at least temporarily. Now, Burgum is back with a new plan that works around that court order by reframing the layoffs as a “reorganization.”
“The reorganization plans across Interior were developed in a ‘very hush hush’ manner, the executive said, noting that no one aside from the very top leadership of each subagency has been involved in the discussions. That secrecy has created a culture of fear and anxiety in the agency and among National Park advocates, who have been cautioning against another reorganization.”
“The Interior Department has already lost more than 10,000 employees since President Donald Trump retook office, largely through voluntary resignation programs directed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the White House. Last year’s reorganization moved support staff into Burgum’s office.”
According to NOTUS, Interior has yet to share details of this plan with Congress, which must approve it before it can be implemented. It’s likely that DOI will seek to begin the reorg sometime between Oct 1 (when fiscal year 2027 starts) and January 3, when the new Congress begins. That would allow the Republican-controlled House and Senate to rubber stamp the move, while evading accountability for it during the mid-terms.
What will the re-organization look like?
“The documents describe transitioning the park service to a new ‘hub and spoke’ model, with some ‘hub’ parks given the power to manage priorities, leadership and direction for ‘spoke’ parks that would report [to] them, according to the documents. Currently park superintendents report to regional leadership.”
This tracks directly with last year’s plan to eliminate staff from NPS regional offices.
While it’s unclear exactly how many staff this “reorganization” intends to eliminate—remember they’re trying to claim it’s not about job cuts—last fall’s effort proposed eliminating 2,050 employees across various DOI agencies, including NPS. NOTUS claims the documents it has reviewed will also bring cuts to those agencies, so I’d imagine they track roughly with last year’s shutdown plan.
Why attempt to pivot away from the regional management model? Management in the national park service is made up of career park service professionals, not political appointees. This makes them somewhat immune to the machinations of any individual administration since they follow larger management directives approved by Congress, and enjoy the career protections typical across the civil service. Changing the structure within which those managers work is one of the only ways to eliminate their jobs, although it remains legally dubious.
Parks PAC, the first ever political action committee created to defend national parks, explains to me that this is a deliberate effort to break the park service, and then use the fact that it’s broken to attempt selling off some national parks.
“The Trump Administration wants to double down on its historically unpopular attacks on our National Park system, called ‘America’s Best Idea,’ by closing regional offices, laying off even more staff and shuttering facilities,” Parks PAC explains. “This is the plunder of our history, our culture, and our landscapes, done quietly because it could not survive being done in the open.”
The unstated goal here is to degrade management in the National Park Service to the point where its disarray can be held up as evidence that the parks no longer financially justify their existence.
And that’s part of the administration’s stated goal of privatizing operations in the big “crown jewel” parks, while selling off smaller, lesser visited units. Nationwide, the park service manages 433 individual sites, ranging from the big parks like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, on down to historic battlefields or National Historic Sites as small as individual homes.
The National Park Conservation Association warned that the $1.2 billion cut to the park service’s budget that the White House proposed last year could have forced the sale of up to 350 of those smaller sites.
Right now, the NPS operates on an appropriated annual budget of only $3.2 billion. Less than the cost of two days of Trump’s illegal war on Iran.
Selling off national parks has been an explicit and stated goal of Burgum’s tenure at DOI. Last June, he testified to Congress that selling national parks was, “on the table.”
Top photo: NPS
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What next? So we should be shouting this from the rooftops right now — and thanks for your fine work.
This is where they’ve been headed all along