DOGE’s Attacks on National Parks Let Public Lands Slip from Public Hands

Eric Anderson thought it was strange when, in late January, his employer, the National Park Service (NPS), called him and his crew back to their home offices in Indiana, Montana, and Colorado. They had been right in the middle of conducting a prescribed burn in the Florida Everglades. 

Prescribed burns prevent out-of-control wildfires from tearing through a landscape by encouraging the growth of some vegetation (like native wetland grasses) and inhibiting others (such as woody brush). They are just one of many activities the NPS carries out in its management of 433 parks across the country. Based in Indiana Dunes National Park, Anderson, a biological science technician, had overseen burns at more than a dozen parks over the course of the past year, his first as a full-time employee with the service.

“I love being able to work on land—to do a project and come back the next season, or later that season, and see the results of the work that you did,” he says.

But Anderson and his crew wouldn’t see the fruits of their labor in the Everglades. The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget had frozen his project’s funds, along with those for dozens of other federal programs and grants. And soon after Anderson returned home, he became one of the 2,300 employees at the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) who were laid off in February under the direction of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

The layoffs have prompted legal action, including a lawsuit filed by a large coalition of unions, local governments, and nonprofits, including NRDC. Plans of the Trump administration have also surfaced that call for even deeper cuts across the federal government—with one in four Interior staff potentially losing their jobs. Such extreme reductions in the federal workforce prevent agencies from providing essential public services; not least among them, managing the country’s vast collection of public lands.

The cuts would likely hit two DOI bureaus particularly hard: The NPS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Together, they oversee about 330 million acres, with the purpose of sustaining the nation’s natural resources for generations to come.

“The employees across the federal land management system—whether in the NPS, BLM, or the Fish & Wildlife Service—are being set up to fail,” says Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation and nature for NRDC. “I think that is part of the plan here, to fundamentally create a situation where they’re dysfunctional.”  

Sabotaging the agencies that manage public lands

For every NPS employee, there are roughly 4,720 acres of land under the service’s purview. When it comes to the BLM, the number of acres per employee jumps to 24,500. McEnaney says the bureau is the largest land management agency with the fewest employees, and it oversees some of the most critical ecological and cultural landscapes.

For 245 million acres of public land—including wilderness areas and national monuments—and 700 million acres of mineral resources belowground, the BLM makes decisions regarding everything from conservation and recreation projects to mining, oil and gas drilling, and wind and solar development. The agency’s duties, as laid out in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, entail generating economic opportunities through the land while also protecting natural, cultural, and historic resources that are too precious to lose. 

“This move to gut BLM is all about taking away any discretion that a BLM staffer may have in trying to meet the multitude of contrasting and conflicting goals,” says McEnaney. “They’re being put in a position where they will not be able to implement the conservation safeguards required by law.” 

The latest DOGE cuts resulted in 800 people (out of a staff of 10,000) losing their jobs. “Not only will the impact of this not be clear for some time yet, but fixing it is going to be a massive job that might even take a generation or two to fix,” says Mary Jo Rugwell, who worked at BLM for 46 years before retiring in 2019. BLM employees often have a lot of technical expertise and “are very hard-working people who have, over time, learned how to get stuff done, despite the fact that they don’t have the resources to do it,” says Rugwell, who now serves as president of the nonprofit Public Lands Foundation. “These are the folks that manage the lands that belong to all of you,” she says.

This was not the first time a Trump administration has taken aim at the BLM. In 2020, then interior secretary David Bernhardt moved the bureau’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado. Of the 328 career employees who worked in the nation’s capital at the time, all but 41 chose not to move across the country. According to a Government Accountability Office report published in 2021, the number of the bureau’s job vacancies also doubled.

While the Biden administration returned the headquarters to the nation’s capital, the damage had already been done. Former BLM director Tracy Stone-Manning called the whole process “wildly disruptive.”  

National parks are profitable and popular—why mess with them?

The NPS is perhaps the most public-facing of the Interior bureaus, with as many as 332 million people visiting the national parks each year. In fact, a PEW research survey published last year showed that the park service is the most popular of all federal agencies—with a 76 percent approval rating. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that the parks are also huge moneymakers. With an already meager budget of $3.57 billion (a mere one-fifteenth of 1 percent of the national budget), national parks bring in $55.6 billion each year. That revenue is now in jeopardy—in the name of “efficiency.”

“I have been looking for a place to invest my money where I can get that kind of return,” says Phil Francis, a former park superintendent who now heads the nonprofit Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. 

NPS employees keep visitors safe and informed while also protecting the plants, animals, and geological structures that comprise the parks’ unique, and often iconic, ecosystems. Managing the visitors to the parks is another critical task—akin to serving as a city manager—says Sheridan Steele, who spent three decades in the service before retiring in 2015. “You put a lot of people in a small space, and you essentially have all the problems of a city,” he says.

Visitors’ cars break down, hikers get lost, the wastewater management needs fixing, and all of these problems fall to the NPS staff. Right now, employee credit cards are frozen, so they can’t purchase anything to help maintain their park’s infrastructure and operations—items like toilet paper, parts for repairing windows and bathrooms, or even the ropes used to rescue climbers. 

In addition to layoffs and buyouts, the NPS is, perhaps unsurprisingly, having difficulty filling other vacancies. In all, the service’s workforce dropped about 20 percent in just a few months. Further weakening the park service’s impact, DOGE plans to eliminate dozens of NPS grants, many of which concern the effects of climate change on public lands.

Laid-off park service employees took to social media to detail what would be at risk without their service and expertise. With the firings and funding freezes, former park superintendents also worry what the summer will bring: fewer rangers to ensure visitor safety; no one to train the seasonal employees who manage crowds; and dirty, broken-down facilities.

“That doesn’t save money,” says Steele. “It just makes it miserable for visitors who encounter the aftermath of poor decisions.”

A push to privatize national parks and public lands?

Critics of the Trump administration’s reshaping of the federal government say hamstringing the NPS and BLM by cutting their funding and workforces—and then pointing out problems with the resulting management shortfalls—may help the administration make a case for selling off public lands. 

“When you start reducing services,” says NRDC’s McEnaney, “you start creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that the parks can’t be managed by the federal government, that they’re failed enterprises, and that the only option is to privatize them.”

Doing so, however, has historically been very unpopular. Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz introduced legislation in 2017 that would have sold off 3.3 million acres of public land in 10 states, but the public outcry that ensued caused him to bail on the bill. Then last year, Utah legislators tried to bring federal lands under state control, claiming that 18.5 million acres of BLM land should be Utah’s. Under its control, Utah would be able to develop the land according to state and local interests—an attempt, critics said, to privatize shared resources. Utah officials asked lawmakers from other states, such as Montana, to join the effort, but it ultimately failed because their constituents wanted to keep public lands in public hands.

Even if the public lands stay in federal control, the current administration wants to open up more to extractive industries. During his first day on the job, building on the president’s “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took swift action to make public lands ground zero for drilling and mining. 

In court, lawsuits have been challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s restructuring of federal agencies and the mass layoffs that come with it. In March, two judges from separate cases ordered the administration to reinstate fired employees. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in April stopped those rehirings, at least temporarily—but not before many employees, like Eric Anderson, went back to work. 

But by the time Anderson and his crew resumed their jobs at the end of March, it was too late to conduct many of the prescribed burns they’d planned for the spring. The result? Lots of vegetative fuel on the landscape ahead of wildfire season.

Anderson, of course, is not feeling confident that the administration won’t lay him off again. So he has renewed his liability insurance in case he has to work as a contractor for a while. “I have opportunities. I have other directions that I can go,” says Anderson. “My concern is the systematic dismantling of the apolitical civil service system.”

A timeline of the Trump administration's attacks on public lands

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