While the Trump administration rushes to reduce expenses and Eliminate federal jobsEven the people who work in national parks – among the most popular and least politicized institutions in the country – find themselves directly in the reticle.
Last week, seasonal workers who face 433 national parks and historic sites, including Yosemite, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, began to receive emails saying that their job offers for the 2025 season had been “canceled”, with few explanations.
This decision triggered panic in the ranks of park employees and threw the hundreds of millions of people who visit the parks every year. On the blocking, hundreds – and potentially thousands – of rangers of the park respond to medical emergencies, as well as to employees of the reception center and the teams that clean the bathrooms and empty trash cans.
In many larger and popular parks, seasonal workers are more numerous than permanent employees all year round, which makes it difficult to imagine how parks will work without them, according to a supervising ranger who asked that his name is not used for fear of reprisals.
“For me, it is unfathomable that we would be able to run a large park without seasonal workers,” she said. “They are essential; They run parks at an operational level. “
In 2021, Yosemite National Park had 741 employees working on the summer season, against 451 during the Dead Winter season, according to the National Park Service website.
Scott Gediman, spokesperson for Yosemite, did not respond to emails and telephone calls asking for comments. Media contacts at the agency office, DC, did not respond either.
In addition to 63 parks named – nine of which are in California, more than any other state – the National Park Service administers 370 other sites, including national monuments, national historic sites and national battlefields. The total mass of land under its supervision is more than 85 million acres.
And they are among the most revered and the most beautiful acres in the United States, attracting more than 325 million visitors in 2023.
E -mails that cancel job offers for parks seem to come from a wider Trump administration hiring a frost for federal agencies, part of a coordinated campaign to reduce the federal budget and weaken a bureaucracy – Trump and its supporters Call it “the deep state” – that he claims to have worked behind the scenes to thwart a large part of his first mandate program.
While many government agencies are inevitably entangled in the polarizing political tug of the nation, the parks are among the few public places where people of all stripes can escape. Exhausted by quarrels on cable news emissions and social media flows? Make a camp under the Yosemite stars, or stroll among the giant Sequoia trees, or look at the sun rise on the silent desert of Joshua Tree. What could be more cleaning?
Certainly not a visit to a bathroom in the National Park this summer, if the job frost actually holds.
In previous stops from Congress budgetary disputes Or the coco-19 pandemic, installations inside the parks deteriorated at an alarming rate. Unauthorized visitors have left human excrement in rivers, painted graffiti on cliffs once virgins, harassed from wild animals and left the toilets resembling “crime scenes,” said the supervising ranger.
“It's scary to see how things can be bad when the places are abandoned with a person looking,” she said.
Apparently lost in politics, it is the quantity of people who sacrifice themselves to take seasonal jobs now canceled. Many workers organize their entire lives around temporary slots, hoping possibly transforming them into permanent careers. They make all kinds of accompaniment jostles during the dead season – the ski patrol, the driving of ambulances – to make sure they are available when the season of summer tourists return.
While dreaded emails were starting to land in their reception boxes, many potential workers were left rushed, wondering if they needed to cancel travel plans, get rid of leases and align other summer jobs.
And it is not as if the jobs of the park were a path to wealth. The salary is lower than that of numerous careers in the private sector, and housing costs can be raised in distant gateway communities on the edges of the parks. People do it because this is the career they have dreamed since they were children.
“We used to joke that we had paid sunsets,” said Phil Francis, president of the Coalition to protect American national parkswhich represents more than 3,100 current employees, former and retired from the National Park Service.
Francis worked for the Parks system for 41 years, including stays in the Yosemite and Shenandoah National Park, before retiring as a superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway in 2013.
“The more we are in break, the less likely it is that the parks will open,” said Francis.
It is not only the accumulation of waste and graffiti whose parks supervisors are worried when they do not have enough employees. It is the safety of visitors. “People are injured, they get lost,” said Francis, so there must be enough rangers at hand to answer, “when things go wrong.”
There are also the economic damage that could be suffered by the many hotels and companies that are based on visitors to the park and by families who have already reserved flights, praised cars and makes hotel reservations on the hypothesis that the parks would be open and functional this summer.
Francis said that many families he had met during his career have seen trips to national parks as a rite of passage, a way to go out and celebrate one of the essential joys of being American.
“There are families who come for decades every year, who make it a tradition,” said Francis.
