President Trump’s decision to keep national parks open during the government shutdown may seem like an attempt to avoid blame for frustrating U.S. travelers. But conservation groups and park workers claim that it will only further crush America’s most popular federal agency.
For months, the National Park Service (NPS) had been operating with a gutted workforce, thanks to Trump’s mass layoffs that cut staff by almost a quarter and left parks around the country “scrambling to operate with bare-bones crews,” as the National Parks Conservation Association, a century-old advocacy group, put it this summer.
Crews became even more skeletal on Wednesday, but the White House did not close the parks. Instead, recreation fees will pay for a limited number of personnel to keep most parks open. Trump did the same during shutdowns in 2018 and 2019, even though the Government Accountability Office deemed it illegal. (Trump’s Office of Management and Budget later disagreed.)
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Advocates for national parks argue that staying open with a skeleton crew makes parks dangerous for remaining staff, visitors, and ecosystems alike. They cautioned that anyone visiting national parks during the shutdown should know that response times to emergencies will be delayed, especially to remote areas and out-of-the-way trails. Conservation work has halted, visitor centers and bathrooms are closed, trash is piling up, and fewer workers are there to address “incidents that happen with wildlife and people,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“It sounds really good to say that the parks are open,” she said. “Trump was definitely trying to score some political points with that move. But in reality, it’s really dangerous.”
Kurose noted that some of the damage that happens to parks during shutdowns is irreversible. When staff returned to Joshua Tree National Park after the record 35-day shutdown during 2018 and 2019, for example, they found that vandals had chopped down Joshua trees, a fragile and protected species, recovery from which one former superintendent estimated would take up to 300 years.
“You had people using off-road vehicles on the dry lake beds in Death Valley, and then in Yosemite, they literally just found feces around the bathrooms because they were locked up,” Kurose said. “When people are left to their own devices, and there’s not anyone there to guide them about how park visitors should be acting, things can go bad very fast.”
REOPENING PARKS IS ONLY THE LATEST ATTACK on the NPS, which runs 433 parks and welcomed a record 332 million people last year. Over the last nine months, the Trump administration’s budget cuts and layoffs have caused at least one-fifth of the parks to be “significantly strained and understaffed,” which came on top of a decade of progressively smaller NPS budgets, according to an investigation by The New York Times. The paper found that between April and July, more than 90 national parks reported issues because of workforce and budget cuts. In addition to dirty, unstocked bathrooms, an end to tours and lectures, and shuttered visitor centers, national parks across the country also lost millions of dollars because no one was there to collect fees.
“Some of the impacts of the staff cuts are visible to the public, but many are not yet. And all of this is only going to get worse,” Phil Francis, a 40-year veteran of the Park Service who chairs the advocacy group Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, told the Times.
He was right. At the Gettysburg National Military Park, for example, there’s no one to keep up with daily maintenance, to stop vandals intent on damaging the site, or prevent visitors from inadvertently walking through a fragile area, said Mark Cochran, president of AFGE Local 3145 and Council 270, who is a tractor operator there.
Gettysburg, the location of a turning-point battle in the Civil War, is 6,000 acres, and like other parks, full of unique needs that require workers. The site is full of one-way roads, for example, and visitors frequently go the wrong way. “People are looking everywhere except where they’re driving,” Cochran said, and need to be guided to a safe place to turn around.
Every fall, workers at Gettysburg must conduct a deer cull with a team of sharpshooters from the USDA, or else the herd gets too big and harms the ecosystem. The sharpshooters typically kill 300 deer, which they then donate to local food shelters. The cull was under way when the shutdown hit. Now it’s unclear if it will continue or how much food the shelters can expect.
When workers return, Cochran said, they can expect a heap of additional work on top of the larger workload. The grass will be overgrown, areas where people aren’t supposed to walk will be damaged, trees will likely be felled and blocking parts of roads. There are three rest areas in the park, he said. Those will have to be cleaned and will likely also be where visitors throw out their garbage, which attracts racoons, possums, and squirrels, making it harder to clean up.
“We were already doing three, four jobs to keep up the bare minimum of maintenance and preservation,” Cochran said.
Last week, in preparation for what they could see coming, more than 40 retired parks superintendents urged Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to close parks and public lands if a shutdown took place. They noted that Americans of all political ideologies love national parks and public lands and said “now is not the time to use the parks and public lands as pawns in political games. As stewards of these American treasures, we urge you to prioritize both conservation and visitor safety and protect our national parks during a potential shutdown, and into the future. If sufficient staff aren’t there, visitors shouldn’t be either.”
Cochran echoed that sentiment, saying that the federal agency has no political ideology and that park rangers work together closely with colleagues with differing political viewpoints.
“We’re able to put our disagreements aside,” he said. “We don’t play partisan games. So the fact that we’re suffering because of partisan politics is ridiculous, especially now, because they’re talking about firing people.”
Asked how Americans can help, he said that people should call their representatives and senators, and “tell them to start acting like adults and not petulant children and do their jobs and come to a resolution.”
A spokesperson for Burgum ignored questions from the Prospect about park safety and maintenance and used the invitation to comment as an opportunity to blame Democrats for the shutdown.
