National Parks Cutting Hours, Limiting Services As Trump Layoffs Reduce Staffing

Transgender references removed from Stonewall website

References to transgender people have been removed from a National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument.

National Parks across the country are cutting hours, cancelling cave tours, closing visitor centers and warning of other cutbacks following Trump administration 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 acknowledgements. 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 was closing its two visitors centers on Mondays starting Feb. 24. At Yosemite National Park, officials announced they're halting reservations for 577 coveted camping spots this summer. Effigy Mounds in Iowa said it's closing its visitor center two days 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 cancelled its guided tours, and announced that in March it will be ending self-guided tours.

Visitors to other parks are also noting 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.

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. And while park employees and advocates say parks were already understaffed, the Trump administration officials said the reductions make 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 typically hired to cope with the influx of visitors. She said park rangers are going to be pulled from interpretive duties to help manage traffic and keep other basic park services running.

The park service maintains and manages more than 400 natural, cultural, and recreational sites, along with about 26,000 historic structures. More than 325 million people visited National Park sites in 2023, the latest year for which statistics are available.

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 cancelled their upcoming trip over concerns about cuts and Trump's tariff war with Canada, costing 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?"

Contributing: Dinah Pulver and Eve Chen