The national parks in New Mexico and beyond are facing a growing crisis because of the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal employees. The first round of firings of rangers and national park managers has hampered the ability of remaining staff to carry out their mandate to protect the parks for the American people. New waves of arbitrary firings of National Park Service personnel are in the offing and staff at New Mexico’s parks are afraid, demoralized, and angry.
Elon Musk, who donated $260 million to the Trump campaign, was put in charge of shrinking the federal government. In likely violation of federal law, he used his access to personnel management computers to bypass the Office of Personnel Management and circumvent the human resources departments in agencies like the National Park Service. Normally, these agencies and offices manage hiring and firing of federal employees. He has cut employees without regard for what they do for the American people or the quality of their work. The National Park Service lost 1000 workers last week to Musk firings.
National Parks are not trivial in a low-income state like New Mexico. We have numerous parks such as White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Bandelier National Monument, Chaco Canyon, Pecos National Historic Park, Valles Caldera etc. Each of these NPS sites draws significant levels of tourism to their part of the state and the cost of managing these parks is far exceeded by the economic benefits the parks bring to the local communities. There are also significant non-economic benefits to visitors and locals alike in having experiences in our National Parks.
In 2020, the National Park Service hosted about 270,000 visitors at Bandelier National Monument, Pecos NHP and Fort Union near Las Vegas, NM. Those visitors spent about $17 million in local communities. Nationally 325 million national park visitors spent about $26 billion near national park areas.
The mass firings of NPS workers last week hit 30% of the staff at Carlsbad Caverns, a major part of Carlsbad’s economy. The NPS has cancelled all tours of the caverns, which may mean that the park could close. Parks are closing visitor centers, ending services, stopping maintenance work, closing campgrounds, and frustrating visitors who are used to thinking of America’s national parks as the finest park system in the world.
Like the firings of the bird flu researchers at the CDC and cancer researchers at the National Institutes of Health, regional electricity managers at the Columbia River dams and air traffic controllers, the firings of National Park Service employees seem random, mean and ideological. The NPS budget is 1/16th of one percent of the federal budget. The cost of all federal personnel in all agencies is 6% of the entire federal budget. The money Musk is “saving” by firing people is trivial, but the damage is widespread and growing.
These firings will cost the US more over time than they will save. Closed national parks, cancer and avian flu research interrupted, Veterans Administration services curtailed, all have ripple effects into the economy and people’s lives. Federal agencies were established to address actual problems and make our country safer for Americans and their businesses.
This crisis created by two hyper-capitalists in the White House obscures what America’s national parks mean to us. The places managed by the National Park Service are the core of our American heritage, a trust handed from one generation to the next. They are places of education and deep spiritual connection for everyone, whether they are historic or natural areas. They must always be owned by all of us together, a true gift to our children.
