What budget cuts and reduced staffing could mean for the National Park Service

People are rightfully concerned about the shape our national parks are going to be in, in the near future and especially in the long term. The big issue here is bleeding staff. A lot of people have left the park service in recent months.

The Trump administration has been urging all kinds of federal workers to leave and retire. And while a lot of National Park Service employees may not have been eligible for what was known as the deferred resignation program, a lot are still eligible for other early retirement programs.

So quite a few workers, when they look at what the future is looking like and they see budget cuts on the menu, are figuring it’s a good time to get out. It’s not clear if all, if many, of these positions are going to be eligible to be refilled. So people are very concerned just about, sort of, a lack of bodies in the parks to do basic stuff, like trail maintenance, fee collection and all the stuff that we’re used to seeing.

I would think the national park areas are going to be just as difficult to maintain once the cutbacks, the people and the money go away. To give you an example, I reported a lot for the story on the C&O Canal, which is really important to us here in D.C., and that park has lost five employees this year.

That may not sound a lot, but they had only 70 employees at the start of the year, so that’s a pretty significant dent, and especially when you look at the positions they lost. They lost the park’s only arborist, you know, who makes sure the trees are in good shape and they’re not falling down on people along the towpath.

They lost the park’s only carpenter, who helps maintain the lock houses and other important structures. And they lost their superintendent of five years, the person who would have been running the park.

These are all people who took early retirement. And so you wonder, are they going to backfill those positions? What is the park going to do when they need an arborist? So these are the things that are happening at parks all over the country.

In a hearing last week on Capitol Hill, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), ranking member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the National Park Service, said that around 100 superintendent positions in the park service are vacant right now. That is a lot, and I’ve been told it is a very unusually high number of vacancies.

They also have several of their regional director positions vacant at the National Park Service. This is stuff that I think concerns people when you think of the direction that the service is heading in.

The Assateague National Seashore, that’s on the Atlantic Ocean in Maryland and Virginia. That park right now does not have lifeguards for the summer and the federal government has acknowledged that it’s due to staffing issues.

The City of Chincoteague has said that the lifeguards on that beach handled 24 saves last year. So when you see there are not lifeguards in a place where they are normally in a national park, that really concerns people.

When you look at the D.C. region, the C&O Canal is one example. But there’s all kinds of National Park Service properties around here, like Kenilworth Gardens in D.C. So these are all places where, if you lose staff, and it’s not clear you can fill that, fulfill those positions.

You have to wonder what’s going to happen to basic maintenance?

Shenandoah National Park, west of here, is one of the most visited parks in the country. I’m told that they’ve lost the sort of staff that maintains trails there. These places didn’t have a lot of staffing to begin with. National Park Service funding has been relatively stagnant for years now, and so a lot of people who work in the park service feel like they were going into these cuts already a bit hobbled just due to a lack of funding and low staffing.

The Trump administration has proposed a really draconian budget for the park service. They actually proposed over a billion dollars in cuts. Now that’s just a budget proposal, right? Congress, at least supposedly, gets the last say on agency funding.

I think what the park service has going forward is just a lot of love among the general public, and the fact that it brings a lot of economic activity to blue and red areas alike, right?

So there are a lot of Republicans who are worried about the administration and where the direction they’re sending the park service in. I think there’s going to be pushback on sorts of the most drastic things that the administration wants to do.

What we are likely to see over the years is probably a long tail to these people leaving the park service, to all these retirements, and possibly more than 1,000 layoffs due to an upcoming reduction in force that we have yet to see from the Trump administration.

There could be sort of a lag of staffing, a sort of basic maintenance not happening for years to come, due to cuts that happen now. So the future, it doesn’t look bright. I think there will be bipartisan pushback on sort of the most drastic things that can happen, though.

These places didn’t have a lot of staffing to begin with. National Park Service funding has been relatively stagnant for years now, and so a lot of people who work in the park service feel like they were going into these cuts already a bit hobbled — just due to kind of a lack of funding and low staffing.

There’s still a lot of dedicated people in the park service, and a lot of them are not going anywhere. I think that’s the positive. I mean, you talk to these people and most are true civil servants. They love what they do and most of them don’t make a heck of a lot of money.

There are not many job listings right now for the National Park Service. But to give you an example, for a maintenance worker, the salaries are around the middle $40,000. Nobody’s getting rich on this.

You know, it’s supposedly a stable job. It’s not very stable right now, but people go into this line of work because they love it, and a lot of those people are still there and they’re not going anywhere.