By Mike Magner, CQ-Roll Call
WASHINGTON — The acting director of the National Park Service believes 2025 was a “kick-ass year.” Advocates for what polls say is the most popular federal agency might use the same term, but with a far different meaning than Jessica Bowron intended in a year-end email to Park Service managers.
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“The past 11 months have been devastating for the National Park Service,” said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association. The NPCA puts full-time Park Service employment at 12,600, down 24 percent since the start of the Trump administration.
“Under this administration, our national parks and the people who protect them have been pushed to the brink through mass staff cuts, hiring freezes and pressured resignations,” Garder said. “Park Rangers are doing the work of multiple people, visitor centers are closing, and morale has never been lower.”
Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, had a similar assessment of morale.
“It is the worst that I’ve ever seen it in over 60 years of affiliation with the NPS,” Wade said via email. “The way that NPS employees have been treated with probationary firings, having to remove ‘negative’ messages (according to the administration) from interpretive programs, threats of termination for speaking out, forced performance ratings, covering for the loss of colleagues, and more, is simply tragic. No one should be treated like these employees have been.”
From the start of the second Trump administration in January 2025, there has been a steady flow of bad news for staff and services at the NPS, the arm of the Interior Department that manages the 64 national parks and 369 other units, including historic sites, battlefields, memorials, monuments, preserves and recreation areas.
President Donald Trump’s quasi-federal agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, and, after DOGE, the Interior Department and the White House Office of Management and Budget eliminated more than 4,000 permanent employees through layoffs, buyouts, firings and forced resignations, according to Park Service records obtained by the NPCA. Some staff members also left voluntarily in frustration.
Fewer seasonal employees
There also were fewer seasonal employees hired than are usually brought on for the park system’s busiest months for visitors, which totaled nearly 332 million in 2024. Visitor statistics for 2025 have not yet been released.
Most visitors probably thought things seemed “pretty normal” in the park system, but many employees were working outside their job descriptions to make sure adequate maintenance and safety was provided, Wade said.
“The big problem, and one that is disguised and will get worse, is behind the scenes,” he said. “Many of the permanent positions that have been lost are ‘specialist’ positions in the central offices — scientists, historians, archeologists, water and air quality specialists, contract specialists, climate change specialists and others.”
The 43-day partial government shutdown in the fall also took a toll, as thousands of employees were furloughed and others worked without pay. And in recent months there have been other stresses on staff, including orders from the administration to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from Park Service informational materials and items for sale in gift shops.
Despite all that, Bowron, who became acting director in early 2025 after 18 years as a budget analyst and comptroller at the NPS, told regional and associate directors in December that things are going great at the NPS. Her email was a follow-up to one from the NPS deputy director of operations, Frank Lands, telling managers that staff were being given too many evaluations rating their work as “outstanding” or having “exceeded expectations,” according to the website National Parks Traveler.
“There is no hard and fast rule” limiting the number of high-level evaluations, Bowron told the managers.
“Thank you, and I look forward to another ass-kicking year with you,” Bowron said in closing her email, obtained by the website’s editor-in-chief, Kurt Repanshek.
“You might say an ‘ass-kicking year,’ if you relish the loss of roughly a quarter of the agency’s workforce, the growing unaffordability of being a ranger, and the watering down of your mission and environmental laws that protect the parks,” Repanshek wrote in a Dec. 14 post.
The NPS press office said the agency does not release internal emails. There was no response to a request from CQ Roll Call for an interview with Bowron.
Annual pass promotes Trump
Other controversies have erupted over the Trump administration’s management of the parks in the past month.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit Dec. 10 seeking to block plans to replace a photo of Glacier National Park with one of the president’s face on the 2026 annual pass for access to the parks that U.S. residents can buy for $80 and nonresidents for $250.
“Blotting out the majesty of America’s national parks with a closeup of his own face is Trump’s crassest, most ego-driven action yet,” said Kierán Suckling, the center’s executive director. “The national parks are not a personal branding opportunity. They’re the pride and joy of the American people.”
A survey by the Pew Research Center released in August found that the National Park Service is the most popular federal agency, with 76 percent of Americans giving it a favorable rating, including 78 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats.
In another move challenged by NPS advocates, the Interior Department announced that Americans will have free entry to the national parks on eight federal holidays next year, but not on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Jan. 19) and Juneteenth (June 19) — two holidays honoring Black history. The department also added free access on Flag Day (June 14), which is also Trump’s birthday.
“Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth symbolize justice, freedom, and service, and they honor the ongoing work of making our country whole,” said Gerry James, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors For All campaign. “Removing free entry to national parks on these federal holidays is a step backward.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., introduced a bill on Dec. 10 that would restore free access to the parks on MLK Day and Juneteenth.
“Free entry days were created as a way for our National Parks to encourage public service and volunteer work,” Cortez Masto said in a news release. “It’s our national responsibility to protect and maintain our public lands — so let’s recommit to ensuring free entry days promote this patriotic act of service, not stroke the President’s ego.”
Garder of the NPCA said Congress should go further and pass legislation protecting the jobs of NPS staff.
“Even during the longest government shutdown in our history, park staff showed up, sometimes without pay, to keep parks open and safe,” he said. “It’s unconscionable the way these dedicated civil servants are being treated. Congress has an opportunity right now to support park staff by blocking any future mass firings at the Park Service.”
Wade, of the park rangers’ association, is worried about the system’s future.
“At the risk of being labeled a conspiracy theorist, my biggest fear is that all of the actions being taken by the administration are designed to ‘starve the National Park Service’ so that, at some point, they can say the agency can no longer carry out its mission; therefore, privatizing or deauthorization of park sites has to be done,” Wade said.
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