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National Parks across the country are experiencing service cuts, including visitor center closures and canceled tours, due to recent federal workforce reductions.California’s national parks, including Yosemite and Whiskeytown, are grappling with staffing shortages, leading to reservation halts and uncertainty about summer operations.The cuts, part of a Trump administration initiative to shrink government, have raised concerns about the impact on visitor experience, park maintenance, and the upcoming tourist season.
National Parks across the country and in California are cutting hours, canceling cave tours, closing visitor centers, and warning of other cutbacks following the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce.
Park advocates and fired employees have been predicting those impacts for weeks, but a string of social media posts from park managers made after the Feb. 14 cuts appear to be the first formal acknowledgments. A Facebook post from the tiny Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado announcing service cuts drew more than 10,000 comments.
“I think it’s going to be a very rough spring,” said Cassidy Jones, a former park service ranger who now works for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association.
Among other parks, Saguaro National Park in Tucson announced that it would close its two visitor centers on Mondays starting Feb. 24. Effigy Mounds in Iowa said it’s closing its visitor center twice a week until the summer.
Online calendars for reservable tours in some parks show zero availability, a casualty of losing the rangers who led them. Carlsbad Caverns National Park has canceled its guided tours and announced that in March, it would end self-guided tours.
Visitors to other parks also note staffing problems, including at Grand Canyon National Park, where terminations cut deeply into the employees who staff the entrance stations, leading to long lines last weekend.
How have DOGE cuts affected California national parks?
At Yosemite National Park in Central California, officials announced they’re halting reservations for 577 coveted camping spots this summer.
In Northern California, an official at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area confirmed to the Record Searchlight the Trump administration has “let go” some employees who work there.
Whiskeytown Superintendent Josh Hoines said he wasn’t sure how the workforce cuts would affect operations at the recreation area during the tourist season.
“We are going to do everything we can to let the dust settle, figure out how to minimize the impacts to visitors for the summer. Beyond that, I don’t really know yet. It’s still pretty fresh, and we’re trying to understand what it looks like,” Hoines said.
The SFGATE reports that California mountain towns across the Sierra Nevada are scrambling to find more information about the extent of the cuts to the National Park Service.
In the Bay Area, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes Alcatraz Island and Crissy Field, fired at least 10 workers this month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
At Devils Postpile National Monument in eastern California, NBC reported the park’s only certified EMT ranger on staff was laid off.
At Joshua Tree National Park, six probationary employees were let go as part of federal government downsizing. The move led to protests.
When did the cuts start at national parks across country?
Trump announced the cuts last Friday in what’s been dubbed the Valentine’s Day Massacre. In addition to the cuts by the Department of the Interior, led by Secretary Doug Burgum, similar cuts were made within the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service and thousands of wildland firefighters and forest rangers.
Roughly 1,000 National Park Service employees were laid off in that round. While park employees and advocates say parks were already understaffed, Trump administration officials said the reductions made good on the president’s promise to reduce the size of government and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.
Advocates say the cuts will hurt the park’s users: the American public.
“I don’t know whether we’ll see overflowing latrines, polluted streams, or deadly wildfires first, but Doug Burgum is already leaving a path of destruction across America’s parks and public lands,” said Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the public lands advocacy group Center for Western Priorities. “These terminations are foolish, heartless, and do nothing to make the government more efficient.
Jones, the former park ranger, said the cuts have injected uncertainty at a time of year when parks are developing school field trip programs, conducting community outreach and preparing for the spring and summer travel season.
July is typically the busiest month for Park Service sites, and thousands of seasonal employees are hired to cope with the influx of visitors. She said park rangers would be removed from interpretive duties to help manage traffic and run other basic park services.
How many national parks are in America?
The park service maintains and manages more than 400 natural, cultural, and recreational sites and about 26,000 historic structures. In 2023, the latest year for which statistics are available, more than 325 million people visited national park sites.
Ashley Korenblat, who runs Western Spirit Cycling in Moab, Utah, said she wonders how many of the people she works with regularly have been let go. Moab is home to Arches and Canyonlands national parks, and depends heavily on their reputations to attract tourists, especially internationally.
“Luckily it’s not high season yet, so we have a minute,” she said. “But there’s the issue of the perception of the problem: If people think there’s a problem, they may cancel their trip even if the problem isn’t actually all that bad.”
Korenblat said a group of Canadian riders just canceled their upcoming trip because of concerns about cuts and Trump’s tariff war with Canada, which cost her a $10,000 booking.
A 2023 National Park Service report said parks in southeast Utah that year drew 2.4 million visitors, directly supported 5,122 jobs and had a cumulative economic impact of more than $486 million.
“We’ve spent millions and millions and millions of dollars marketing America’s National Parks to the world and now we’re just throwing away that money,” she said. “Are we making these cuts to low-paying jobs so we can give a bigger tax break to the rich? Is that the plan?”
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Publish date : 2025-02-22 05:25:00
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