The Shutdown May Be Over, But Its Damage To National Parks Is Just Beginning

How much harm was caused by open, but understaffed parks?

National Park staff are returning to work today following the longest government shutdown in American history. One in which national parks were kept open, despite furloughs that impacted 60 percent or more of the staff who remain, following the administration’s attempts to gut the department. What will they find?

Damage We Know About

Graffiti In Arches National Park: On November 5, a hiker discovered hand prints, faces, and text scrawled across the arch and spire formations in Devils Garden using white paint. According to the Utah News Dispatch, it’s unlikely that an investigation will be pursued as park funds are needed to protect visitors.

Fire In Joshua Tree: In mid-October, a wildfire broke out in the park’s Black Rock Campground, forcing campers to flee, threatening the visitor center, and going on to burn 72 acres. The park itself was unable to issue warnings at the time, and that duty was instead handled by CalFire, which responded to the incident. The extent of the damage remains unknown.

Fire In Zion: On October 7, a lightning strike started a fire on the park’s West Rim. It was spotted by park staff and firefighters stopped it at 25 acres. The West Rim Trail remains closed.

Bear/Human Interactions In Yellowstone: As I warned, October and November are hyperphagia season for both black and brown bears, and without staff to supervise interactions, significant risk was posed by tourist behavior. It sounds like there were some close calls, but as far as we know, no bears have yet had to be relocated or killed.

BASE Jumping/Climbing In Yosemite: Visitors took advantage of the reduced ranger presence to illegally jump off El Capitan and scale Half Dome without permits. It also sounds like a non-trivial number of people may haver overstayed the 14-night limit in the park’s campgrounds. No injuries or deaths have been reported.

Stone Wall In Gettysburg Damaged: A vehicle appears to have collided with a stone wall in the Devil’s Den area of the Gettysburg National Military Park sometime around October 14. While the damage is extensive, the wall is not of historical significance.

Why Wasn’t It Worse?

It’s likely that more damage will be found, but the conclusion here remains obvious: national parks dodged a bullet. During the 35-day shutdown that spanned 2018 and 2019, the situation in national parks appears to have been much worse. Visitors were killed, toilets famously overflowed, trash piled up everywhere, and significant damage occurred to park infrastructure.

Why was this time different? Three reasons:

NPS Staff Are Putting In Heroic Efforts: Faced with an attempt by the Trump administration to concoct justification for a selloff of smaller park sites and privatization of operations even in “crown jewel” parks like the Grand Canyon, park rangers are defying the odds, and holding parks together despite a reduction in staffing from around 20,000 to somewhere between 14,500 and 15,500 full-time employees.

This superhuman effort is not without cost. Even before the shutdown, morale at NPS was already at an all-time low. Response times for search and rescue operations have increased to levels that are seriously risking lives.

Nearly 100 superintendent positions remain vacant at park sites nationwide, and in the ones that remain, those senior managers are doing everything they can. A report from Arches says that park’s superintendent manned the visitor services desk through the extent of the shutdown.

Non-Profits Are Showing Up: National Parks are supported by a network of charitable organizations, both nationwide and ones dedicated to specific parks. In Yellowstone, for instance, Yellowstone Forever provided the funding necessary to keep visitor centers, restrooms, and stores open, and provided assistance to visitors. Volunteers cleaned restrooms and emptied trash cans.

Entry Fee Accounts Funded Exempted Employees: As I was first to report the night before the shutdown began, the Department of the Interior bent the law to authorize parks to tap into their entry fee accounts—essentially cash in the tills—both individually and regionally. This appears to have kept a significant number of non-essential staff working during the shutdown.

According to that contingency plan, the number of “excepted” employees—those performing essential duties like law enforcement, fire fighting, and emergency response—totaled 2,500 to 3,100 people. But, reporting indicated about 6,000 total staff remained working in national parks throughout the shutdown, performing largely visitor-facing duties. Some workers may also have been required to show up without pay.

“It seems like they’re trying to keep up the facade to impact the American public less,” one ranger told The LA Times. The administration seems to have learned from all the negative press it accrued around impacts to national parks caused by that 35-day shutdown during Trump’s first season in the White House, and used those entry fee accounts to ensure they didn’t suffer a repeat.

@resistancerangers

Resistance Rangers on Instagram: "As we return to work after th…

So What’s The Problem?

About 80 percent of entry fee money remains in the park where they’re collected, and they’re budgeted to conduct science, maintenance, and construction, among other needs. But visitor fees were not collected during the shutdown, so given both its unprecedented 43-day duration and the large number of staff who were retained using those funds, its virtually certain that those accounts are close to being zeroed out. Because the rest of NPS’s budget is congressionally appropriated, that will prevent the science, maintenance, and construction that individual parks and regional offices had planned to carry out using entry fee money from occurring.

Another thing that was prevented from occurring during the shutdown? Reductions in force. The Department of the Interior, which manages NPS, attempted to use the shutdown as a reason to RIF 2,050 employees, including 272 in the park service. A court issued a temporary stay, and the budget agreement to reopen the government has prevented further mass employee terminations from occurring until the end of January. It’s reasonable to assume that DOI will continue its efforts at that time.

As the year ends, NPS is also losing $267 million in Biden-era funding to support staffing in National Parks, that’s out of a total budget that only reached $3.3 billion in FY2025. The budget agreement that re-opens the government will fund NPS at that level through January. But after that, more cuts are likely.

How bad will those be? The White House has proposed cutting $1 billion from the park service’s annual budget, a move the National Parks Conservation Association warns could lead to the loss of over 350 of our 433 national park sites. The House Appropriations Committee is being a little more reasonable, and is only proposing a $176 million cut. But, according to NPCA, even that would still result in, “the loss of thousands more park employees critical to park operations.”

All that appears to be building towards an inevitable downsizing at the National Park Service that will take staffing cuts far beyond the 5,000 employees who have already been lost this year. More than simply a loss to the NPS’s ability to carry out its mission, that will further impact agency-wide morale, and could begin to seriously effect the safety of visitors. Now, on top of all that, parks will also have to work without 43-days of visitor entry fees, amid all the added cost and stress involved with remediating damage done during the shutdown.

There’s already talk that those extreme cuts being proposed for NPS and other federal agencies could lead to another disagreement between lawmakers, and another government shutdown as soon as the end of January. How much more of this can our national parks, and the people dedicated to protecting them endure?

Top photo: NPS

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