It’s unclear when — or if — that will happen. Last Friday, the Trump administration began laying off thousands of public land managers, including 3,400 new hires to the U.S. Forest Service and 2,300 to the Department of the Interior, about a thousand of whom worked for the National Park Service. Adding insult to injury, the email firing the probationary employees told them they’d “failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills and abilities do not meet the department’s current needs,” despite many having unblemished or even exemplary employment records.
The cuts have placed a staggering strain on the remaining employees at the agencies. “Cutting thousands of National Park Service and Forest Service jobs is like reducing ski patrol during peak season — it may not shut everything down, but it makes access, safety, and the outdoor experience more challenging for everyone,” Ryan Laemel, the chief operating officer of Protect Our Winters, an outdoor recreation environmental nonprofit, wrote to me in a statement.
And there are more existential crises, too, like the cessation of fire risk reduction work, which could result in worse wildfires, and an abrupt halt to decades of ongoing scientific research in the parks, which will leave a gaping hole in our understanding of our own country’s climate and ecosystems. “Public lands aren’t just places to recreate — they are part of the climate solution and hold deep cultural significance, especially for Indigenous communities who have stewarded these landscapes for generations,” Laemel pointed out. Forests and grasslands managed by now-terminated employees “store carbon, protect water sources, and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.”
In Montana, for example, only three full-time workers now maintain all the infrastructure in the Yellowstone and Bozeman Ranger Districts, which cover 1 million acres, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports. “I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position,” Alex Wild, a ranger who lost his job at Yosemite, wrote in an Instagram post that more than 150,000 people have liked. “I mean, they just can’t. I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.”
Stories like Wild’s have struck a chord on social media, where there has been an upswelling of outrage over the public land manager layoffs. Though President’s Day weekend saw general protests across the U.S. against Elon Musk’s idea of efficiency, NOAA firings and USAID workers losing their jobs haven’t, on their own, generated quite the same level of backlash.
Part of that is likely an issue of immediacy: 85% of Americans have vacationed at a National Park, but it’s not necessarily apparent from looking at your iPhone that you’re relying on free NOAA data. But Americans also have an almost cuddly reverence for forest rangers; as one social media user aptly put it, they’re basically the “librarians of the forest.” Eliminate their jobs and face the wrath of everyone who had a childhood dream of wearing a quad-dented straw hat when they grew up.
Neal Clark, the wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a nonpartisan non-profit leading efforts to protect public lands, told me he thinks the Trump administration is playing a long game with its sabotage of the Forest Service and Department of the Interior. “The bigger point is that when you cut staff from the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service — agencies that have been chronically underfunded for decades — the additional lack of capacity and resources is ultimately going to catch up,” he warned. “It’s going to catch up with this administration, and it’s going to catch up to public land users.”
Trailhead closures like that at Franklin Falls are only the very beginning. Maybe this summer you’ll find it difficult to get the river permit you’ve come to expect for your annual family float trip. Perhaps you’ll find you can’t reserve a campsite in a National Park, or maybe the bathroom at your favorite trailhead will be closed or not serviced. Park infrastructure in general will get worse, making visits frustrating and messy; the $23 billion maintenance backlog at the National Parks will balloon into a multi-generational challenge.
Clark suspects this chaos is by design. “It’s intended to decrease the functionality. It’s intended to demoralize dedicated staff,” he said. “Ultimately, the goal is to bolster what has been a long-standing effort by industry and elected officials who back industry to sell off, transfer, or otherwise privatize public lands.”
Despite the incredible unpopularity of land privatization — majorities in every Western state, including conservative strongholds such as Wyoming and Montana, oppose the concept — there has been substantial talk of eliminating public lands by those in and around the Trump administration. By gutting the Forest Service and Department of the Interior, signs of strain will start to show. That, in turn, will “further bolster the argument that these lands would be better managed by the states, or in private hands,” Clark said.
It’s a playbook that is familiar across the government. If there is a silver lining, though, it’s that Americans really do seem energized to defend their access to the outdoors. “Protest. Speak up!” one Zion National Park ranger implored her followers this weekend. “Our nation is only as strong as we all stand together.”
