National Parks In "Survival Mode": Half Big Bend NP Staff Gone, 60 Vacant Positions In AK, No Lifeguards At Assateague

Across the US’s fabled but overstretched national parks, unusual scenes are playing out this summer following budget cuts by Donald Trump’s administration. Archeologists are staffing ticket booths, ecologists are covering visitor centers and the superintendents of parks are even cleaning the toilets. The National Park Service (NPS), responsible for maintaining cherished wildernesses and sites of cultural importance from Yellowstone to the Statue of Liberty, has lost a quarter of its permanent staff since Trump took office in January, with the administration seeking to gut the service’s budget by a third.

But the administration has also ordered parks to remain open and accessible to the public, meaning the NPS has had to scramble remaining staff into public-facing roles to maintain appearances to the crowds of visitors. This has meant much of the behind-the-scenes work to protect endangered species, battle invasive plants, fix crumbling infrastructure or plan for the future needs of the US’s trove of natural wonders has been jettisoned. “It’s nearly impossible to do the leadership role expected of me,” said one superintendent who heads a park in the western US who didn’t want to be named for fear of retribution from the administration. “I’m doing everything now. That means I regularly have to make sure the doors are open, I have to run the visitor center, I have to clean the bathrooms. I’d say I’m cleaning the bathroom on a weekly basis now because there’s no one else to do it.”

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Doug Burgum, Trump’s secretary of the interior, has said that the agency can be slimmed down while still maintaining services such as campgrounds, bathrooms and visitor centers. “I want more people in the parks, whether they’re driving a snowplow in the wintertime or whether they’re working with [an] interpreter in the summertime or they’re doing trail work,” Burgum told a Senate hearing in June. “I want more of that. I want less overhead.” But even as staff are pressed into frontline roles, gaps are appearing that critics say can endanger safety. All 13 lifeguard positions are vacant at the Assateague Island national seashore in Maryland and Virginia, according to advocacy group the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a site where a man drowned last week.

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The Trump administration has imposed a hiring freeze upon the NPS but has allowed for nearly 8,000 seasonal hires, although barely half of this total has been achieved before the summer peak. Last year, a record 331m visits were made to national parks – a record – and a new high mark may be reached again in 2025. “We’ve successfully hired thousands of seasonals and in most parks, staffing is on par with last year,” an NPS spokesperson said. “As in other years, we are working hard to make it another great year for visitors. Our employees are hard-working, experienced problem-solvers and it’s not unusual for them to adapt to changing conditions.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/07/us-national-parks-trump-cuts