By Miriam Raftery
Photo via Alt National Park Service: upside down flag hung by employees at Yosemite National Park signals dire distress
February 25, 2025 (Washington D.C.) – In what’s been dubbed a Valentine’s Day massacre, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired 1,000 National Park Service employees from the nation’s 63 national parks, plus another 2,000 U.S. Forest Service workers. Additional cuts target Bureau of Land Management’s 245 million acres and other federal lands. The action is creating havoc, including in California, which has more national parks than any other state.
At Yosemite, where the cuts have forced temporary closure of four popular campgrounds, park employees hung an upside-down flag, a universal symbol of distress, atop El Capitan as crowds gathered for the annual firefall event.
“It’s not sustainable if we want to keep the parks open,” Gavin Carpenter, a Yosemite maintenance worker who supplied the flag, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re bringing attention to the parks, which are every American’s properties.”
Alex Wild is now the only ranger at Devil’s Postpile National Monument in California who is certified as an emergency medical technician. “I’m the only person available to rescue someone, to do CPR, to carry them out from a trail if they got injured,” he told NBC. The cuts could mean “life or death for someone who’s having an emergency.”
Fire prevention workers have also been let go, including Michael Maierhofer, a Forest Service trail maintenance worker at the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. He says his crew was dubbed a “fire militia” for its efforts to help with fires in the district ranging from extinguishing abandoned campfires to aiding in larger wildfire suppression, Montana Free Press reports.
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado has been forced to close two days a week due to lack of staffing, the site posted on Facebook, while visitors to Zion National Park in Utah found long lines of vehicles due to not enough staff to man entry booths, CNN reports.
At Wrangell ST. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, which encompasses more than 14 million acres, the only bush pilot was fired, Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers told CNN. “Now how do they protect the wildlife and detect poaching activities, or find somebody that’s overdue in the park or climbers in distress and so forth?” he asked.
Without enough rangers to patrol vast areas such as Yellowstone National Park, environmentalists fear poaching of endangered or threatened wildlife and destruction of sensitive plant species.
Photo, left by Miriam Raftery: moose at Yellowstone National Park
Beth Pratt, California Director of National Wildlife Federation, recalls that when parks were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and didn’t have staffers there, “people were cutting down Joshua Trees” at Joshua National Park, she recalls, adding that graffiti, trash, and driving on protected meadowlands also occurred.
“There’s no real staffing plan. It’s chaotic, and there’s no leadership from the Secretary of the Interior,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, NPR reports.
Fired workers accuse DOGE of lying in claims of poor performance reviews, with many saying they had positive recent reviews. “It’s a complete lie,” says Andria Townsend, a fired Yosemite specialist on carnivores. “I work really hard at my job. I have two degrees,” she told KFSN.
Richard Midgette, an IT specialist in Yellowstone who was also fired on Feb. 14, says he’s done “great work” including helping to optimize Yellowstone’s communications system and developing computer code to streamline onboarding and offboard employees. He believes his firing is both unwarranted and illegal. Claiming poor performance without evidence is “just a legal way that they’re trying to cover their ass.”
The layoffs present hardships for the thousands of employees let go, since most were low paid and moved long distances to work for the park or forest service, and now have no alternative jobs in the vicinity.
The National Federation of Federal Employees, the union representing Forest Service and National Park Service workers, has filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the firings of those and other federal agency employees, a total that the union said could impact a half million federal workers, the Montana Free Press reports. The suit contends that DOGE and an executive order signed by President Donald Trump violate federal law outlining how federal workforce reductions must be handled—which requires action by Congress.
“There is no statute that expressly authorizes the President to slash roughly one-quarter of the federal workforce, imperiling the statutory missions that Congress has assigned to federal agencies,” the unions’ Feb. 14 filing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia states,” adding that the executive branch’s efforts to “hobble agencies that Congress created” by carrying out “mass firings and a pressure campaign for resignations violates separation of power principles.”
Since the initial Feb. 14 mass firings, the Trump administration has backtracked partially, agreeing to hire nearly 3,000 seasonal workers for the summer season, Associated Press reports. But seasonal jobs are entry-level, and won’t make up for management-level employees fired, says Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.
“You really can’t have the seasonals without the other full0time staff people who are helping to manage them,” Brengel told CNN.
Brengel notes that national parks were already short-staffed before the recent lay-offs, operating with 20% fewer employees than in 2010. “There was no fat to trim,” she asserts.
The cuts also come after the Trump administration has voiced support for opening up federal lands including national forests to mining, logging, oil and gas drilling.
“It feels like if nothing is done to prevent this administration from dismantling our public lands and the support behind them, we could very well lose access to the trails, the mountains, the plains and the wildlife that we all love so dearly,” former National Parks employee Midgette says.
Twenty Congressional Democrats did sign a letter calling the cuts “damaging and short-sighted” and warning that the mass layoffs could cause “staffing chaos” in national parks and even lead to closure of some parks entirely. But Democrats lack power, since Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency. While most Republicans have been silent on the issue, Republican Senator Susan Collins from Maine has voiced concerns over the impacts on Acadia National Park in her state.
Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, believes it’s up to the public to take action and save America’s most beloved places.
“It’s clear that the people of this country really love their national parks,” he told CNN. “and now it’s time for them to do something about it.”