We’re well into the high tourist season for visiting national parks and other public lands, when the agencies managing them—like the National Park Service (NPS), US Forest Service (USFS), and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—rely on seasonal help to manage crowds, maintain trails, and seize opportunities to educate the masses on the etiquette and ecosystems of the great outdoors.
After the Trump administration cut thousands of staffers from each of those agencies and froze much of their funding this year, this summer has been anything but typical.
Although the administration walked back some of those draconian measures—thanks largely to public outcry—much damage had been done. Not only have full-time hiring managers been axed and HR departments dismantled, but the process of clearing seasonal government employees to work—a process that involves, in part, FBI background checks—was delayed to the point that few were cleared to work on their summer start dates.
And thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the NPS has been freshly gutted of $267 million. The bill even subjects national forests and other public lands to large-scale logging, drilling, oil and gas lease sales, and related ravaging at a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution.
“It’s the worst public lands bill in US history,” says Nick Gevock, Sierra Club’s conservation campaign strategist for the northern Rockies states. Gevock points out an unsettling pattern: “The less connection a US president has to the natural world,” he says, “the worse we do on the environment.”
Here’s how this situation is creating a perfect storm for lands managers and what they are doing about it.
Nebulous impacts
Reports of how these cuts are impacting public lands are just starting to come in. Some say national parks and Forest Service campgrounds appear to be managing business as usual. Others reportunkempt trails, parkmuseums and visitor centers gone dark, a dearth of rangers and educational programming, and closed bathrooms (Mount Rainier National Park, for one,lost its only plumber to this administrative purge).
Some inconsistency can be attributed to the uniqueness of individual sites and campgrounds. Jarrod Ross, a former Yellowstone employee and current operations manager for private guiding service Good Trip Adventures, says that at a recent training he attended, Grand Canyon’s superintendent spoke of the need to triage what’s most important in the short term. “He said there was no way they’d ever cut search-and-rescue in a place with such a high need for it,” Ross told Sierra. “So cuts at Big Bend probably look a lot different than those at Yellowstone, where you’ve got extreme visitor safety concerns from wildlife and geothermal activity.”
Former NPS leaders caution that budget cuts will come at the expense of more “backstage” endeavors. That includes the biological monitoring and research so fundamental to conserving and preserving public lands—and what they have to teach us—for future generations. The Trump administration’s recent slashing of theUS Geological Survey’s ecological research arm, and theEPA’s research and development office, are just two examples.
Tania Lown-Hecht, vice president of communications and strategy for conservation advocacy group Outdoor Alliance, says that in recent meetings with public land agencies, OA has learned of cuts to invasive species management and habit restoration endeavors, avalanche forecasting, and long- and short-term fire suppression programs. “So much is anecdotal, though,” Lown-Hecht told Sierra. “No one is collecting data. The agencies don’t know who they’ve lost or what services aren’t being done. A lot of the impacts [of the federal cuts] we’ll see not necessarily this summer but over the next several years.”
A seasonal NPS ranger who asked to remain anonymousdue to admonitions that talking to the press could result in criminal charges told Sierrathat because so many higher-paid perennial positions in upper management have been cut, confusion pervades within her park. “The people with the institutional knowledge are gone, and people in lower positions are doing managerial work and feeling used,” the staffer said. “Everyone’s title is ‘acting’ this, ‘acting’ that.”
Whitewashed plaques
NPS signage emblazoned with QR codes—through which visitors are encouraged to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features”—are now appearing across parks and campgrounds. According to Will and Jim Pattiz—brothers, conservationist videographers, and creators of the popularMore Than Just ParksSubstack—the QR codes are likely a result of anexecutive order Trump issued in March that instructed the NPS to review plaques at its 433 sites to ensure they exclusively emphasize the “progress of the American people” and “grandeur of the American landscape” (as well as a secretarial order that mandates the QR codes).
Photo by Katie O'Reilly
Some superintendents report that the vast majority of comments coming in through the QR code are supportive of the parks.
“One of the things to be proudest of as an American is our parks’ ability to acknowledge our nation’s history, warts and all. Now [the Trump administration] is making a purposeful effort to erase history,” says Gevock. “But the hard reality, as any professional historian will tell you, is that it’s not just gonna go away.”
Running on fumes
Morale is at an all-time low within the ranks of those who manage and maintain public lands. Anecdotal reports abound of employees returning from approved vacations to find themselves jobless or time-off requests canceled.
The anonymous staffer attributes much of this to DOGE’s“five points” emails, through which federal employees were expected to confirm compliance of job duties on the daily. “It goes to show how little [Trump or Musk] know about how these public lands are run,” the staffer says, explaining that most park and forest rangers spend their workdays far from the government computers necessary to compose these five points.
Another person who asked to remain anonymous because she is the parent of a national park ranger told Sierra that park personnel work in a climate of fear. “These people are there because they love those lands, yet they have to live with the day-to-day stress of losing not only their jobs and colleagues but the places they love,” the parent said.
Meanwhile, more people are stepping up to do their part and supportpublic lands staffers. Sue Hinkle, a retired family therapist in Durango, Colorado, started volunteering after seeing an ad that nearby Mesa Verde National Park’s volunteer supervisor placed in the local paper last spring. “I’d been marching and writing letters but jumped at the opportunity to do something more hands-on too,” says Hinkle, who now supports rangers at Mesa Verde’s currently inundated information center. “None of the rangers are really talking about cuts or how they’re being affected, which makes me think there’s probably a directive not to,” says Hinkle, who adds that volunteering has been “personally so healing.”
What’s a public lands lover to do?
Visitors can support public lands staff by reviewing Leave No Trace principles and exercising extreme caution when recreating. Ross recommends hauling your own trash out of parks and campgrounds to lighten custodial workloads and carrying gloves and tools in your backpack, “so you’re equipped to remove trail detritus and, if you’ve got a green thumb and savoir-faire when it comes to hyperlocal flora, perhaps even invasive weeds.”
Lown-Hecht emphasizes grassroots efforts like writing letters and calling local officials. “People have been writing and calling about public lands at a scale I haven’t seen before,” she says. “It’s galvanizing to see people get up in arms about agency cuts and staffing cuts, and really standing up for public lands and water. And even more so to see that Congress really does respond to that.”
