Politicians who want to conceal their actions often do things on Friday afternoon to avoid the attention of the media. Last Friday, the Trump regime fired hundreds of people in agencies that protect our environment. The Environmental Protection Agency, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Forest Service and the National Park Service all saw staff fired.
1000 NPS employees were among 2400 Department of Interior firings. The actions focused on people who had been recently hired into permanent positions called “probationary” employee, regardless of their skills or the need of the agency or park for their contributions. With many baby-boom staff retiring, these young staff are important to the agency’s future.
People who follow the affairs of the national parks closely mostly agree that the NPS has been understaffed for decades due to inadequate budgets coming from Congress. The NPS staff has fallen by 20% since 2010. The NPS has staffing shortages in almost all areas related to serving the visiting public including maintenance, law enforcement, education and interpretation, and natural resources management. The Musk staff cuts cannot be realistically viewed as money saving, the rational for the mass firings of federal workers, since NPS workers’ salaries and benefits are a microscopic portion of the federal budget, and their work creates a great deal of private sector economic activity in all the communities near parks and monuments that exceeds the cost of running the parks in many cases.
The federal workforce costs taxpayers $350 billion per year. That’s about 5% of the $6.5 trillion budget. The US Department of Interior employs about 63,000 people nationwide. The bulk of the federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Department of Defense.
A group of Democratic senators wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently urging him to fully staff the NPS for the sake of the parks, their visitors, and the gateway communities. No republicans signed the letter.
Meanwhile at the US Forest Service where most of the wildland firefighters in the West work, more workers were fired. The agency was facing a large shortfall in firefighters even before Trump was elected and now with the federal hiring freeze and employee firings, many worry that too few firefighters will be available when the inevitable wildfires start this summer. Fire agencies were struggling to hire people due to low pay, housing problems, and a lack of benefits for seasonal workers before Trump returned to office.
Quoting the Santa Fe New Mexican: “Lord knows we’re going to have a hell of a fire season this year,” Heinrich said. “That’s just insane. Why anyone would think that’s appropriate is shocking to me.” Heinrich is talking about firing wildland firefighters.
Today, the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reports that 30% of the staff at the Santa Fe National Forest has been fired by Trump. The US Forest Service was already understaffed to the point where they could not perform basic functions on the public lands such as maintaining roads, trails, clearing trash or managing wildlife habitat.
The Trump regime has been opaque about the cuts in New Mexico. US Senator Martin Heinrich asked the Trump people directly about who had been fired in New Mexico federal offices, and they told him they didn’t know.
Quoting the New Mexican: “This entire DOGE effort is completely un-transparent, and there’s no one to talk to,” Heinrich said, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency initiative headed by Elon Musk. “There’s no one you can call up and say, ‘How many folks got laid off at the BLM in the New Mexico office?’”
Heinrich suspects that firefighters are among those fired. He said that all the national parks in New Mexico suffered firing and that as many as 30% of the staff at Carlsbad Caverns may have been fired though Trump’s staff either doesn’t know or won’t say. The DOGE staff says that the agencies are managing the staff firings. The agencies heads won’t say much about the firings to politicians or the public.
Probationary employees lack employment protections that established permanent employees enjoy, though the Trump regime has been ignoring many aspects of federal employment law that prescribe a process for removing employees. The mass firings bypass the process that individual employees expect, including an appeals process. Already employee labor unions say they plan to litigate the latest round of firings.
Meanwhile the seasonal workforce which provides the bulk of visitor services in the national parks is in total disarray. Trump rescinded work offers to thousands of NPS employees when he returned to the White House. Then his staff said they had changed their mind, and 5000 seasonal workers would return. But Politico got access to a Trump administration e mail saying that only 300 seasonals would be hired this year. In normal years, the NPS hires 8000 seasonal employees and still cannot keep up with the needs of an ever-growing number of visitors.
The Trump regime has only been in power a few weeks. Nobody knows if mass firings of federal workers will continue for the next four years, putting federal employees on edge and enduring an atmosphere of intimidation or if the legal efforts to block these firings will be effective and if the administration will follow court orders.
We just were informed that Trump fired one person at the Valles Caldera, a recreation planner.
What you can do:
Write a letter to the editor. Tell your Congressional delegation what you think about the staffing situation. Keep in mind that the Congressional offices are experiencing record volume of public contacts due to the crisis in Washington:
https://www.heinrich.senate.gov/contact/write-martin/form
https://www.lujan.senate.gov/contact/contact-form/
https://fernandez.house.gov/contact/
