The Arthur Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge is only 20 minutes from Mar-a-Lago. (Photo via Friends of the Arthur Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge)
Dear Elon Musk,
Hi! We’ve never met, but I feel like we have some things in common. A college dean once dubbed me “the most destructive force on campus,” and you’re clearly the most destructive force in the entire U.S. government. So, we got that going for us, which is nice.
I mean, in running your Department of Government Efficiency, you seem as comfortable riding a wrecking ball as Miley Cyrus! Look at all the stuff your unleashed DOGE has wrecked in just a month’s time — Social Security, Veterans Affairs, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
You even had the gall to lay off air traffic controllers right after the deadliest crash in the U.S. since 2001 and to fire weather forecasters right after a season full of hurricanes.
Thousands of federal employees have been fired (albeit illegally). Entire agencies shuttered. The millions of poor people they serve abruptly kicked to the curb at the behest of the world’s wealthiest man. It’s enough to make those old bomb-throwing anarchists of the 1920s weep for joy.
Sure, there have been pointed jokes that YOU’RE the immigrant who’s come to steal all those jobs. Persnickety reporters have pointed out that the math on this massive purge doesn’t work. And, of course, there have been gobs of angry protesters at Tesla dealerships
But hey, you know what they say: “You can’t make an omelet without firing a bunch of veterans.”
However, I want to warn you about one big mistake you’re making. You have GOT to stop firing park rangers.
Your dodgy DOGE has been laying off rangers and scientists left and right. This must stop before you do irreparable damage to the people’s property.
“Quite simply and astonishingly, this is dismantling the National Park Service as we know it, ranger by ranger and brick by brick,” said Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, told me that, so far, she’s heard of at least 25 rangers and scientists who have been laid off or fired from Florida’s national parks, refuges, and seashores. That’s a cut deeper than any made by slash-happy movie monster Freddy Krueger.
I am not saying you should stop just because I like our national parks. I’m saying you need to stop because we really depend on them in Florida for a big chunk of our tourism trade. If your cuts trash our national parks, you’ll crash our economy.
Unless, of course, that’s your intention. In that case, you’re right on target for blowing up the whole system and leaving nothing but a big crater. But I beg you, please don’t.
America’s best idea
Pull out a map, Mr. M, and marvel at how much federal parkland is in Florida.
From the Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola to the Dry Tortugas southwest of Key West, we’ve got 11 national parks, plus preserves, refuges, and monuments all across the state. We’ve even got one that goes underwater, Biscayne National Park.
In 2023, more than 13 million people visited them, creating an economic boon of $1.4 billion to the economy, according to the Palm Beach Post.
If you fire the rangers who tend to those parks, the places will fall apart and then shut down. The visitors will stop coming. The ancillary businesses that depend on the parks — hotels and motels, airboat tours, kayak rentals, bait shops, and so forth — will see their traffic and profits shrivel up.
None of us wants that.
Perhaps you’re under some false impression about what these parks are for. Maybe you think they’re like New York’s Central Park — a green space in a gray place, full of park benches and playgrounds, nothing more. But that’s not the case.
“Ken Burns called the national park system ‘America’s best idea,’ and there’s a lot of truth in that,” said Mark Woods, a Jacksonville newspaper columnist who’s written an award-winning book about spending a year visiting parks across the country called “Lassoing the Sun.” “These parks are places where I go and I feel proud to be an American.”
When he’s chatted with foreign visitors in the parks, Woods told me, “They say, ‘We don’t have national parks like you do.’”
He pointed out that your dogged DOGE is supposed to be sniffing out waste and fraud. But the rangers losing their jobs are people who do essential services, such as cleaning the toilets, rescuing hikers in trouble, and keeping the park trails clear of obstructions.
‘They’ve been underfunded for a while, too,” Woods said.
I looked it up and he’s right. In 2023, a top official of the National Parks Service told Congress, “The NPS has more assets than staff and funding to adequately operate and maintain them.”
Now here you are, Mr. Musk, telling the painfully skinny park service that it’s overweight and needs to lose a lot of pounds. That makes no sense at all.
Heck, from what I’ve read, those park rangers that you’re trying to oust make a lot less money than the staffers on your dopey DOGE division. Considering the number of errors DOGE has made, I think your Musk-ovite minions are overpaid.
A visit to Loxahatchee
I have read that you’re renting a $2,000-a-night bungalow at Mar-a-Lago. That means you’re just 20 miles away from one of Florida’s great environmental preserves, the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Boynton Beach.
You should take a day off from destroying the government and go take a gander at this place.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Loxahatchee refuge is “one of the largest urban wildlife refuges in the nation with more than 145,000 acres of land where visitors can unplug from the stresses of daily life and reconnect with our natural surroundings.”
Lots of people go to the refuge to bike, hike, fish, look at birds, or paddle their canoes and kayaks, said Michelle Hendricks, president of the Friends of the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. But refuges are not the same as parks, she told me.
“Parks are a refuge for people,” she said. “The refuges are maintained for the animals.”
Loxahatchee in particular is pretty special. According to Hendricks, it’s “one of the last remaining intact parcels of the once-vast Everglades.”
Within its boundaries you’ll find wet prairies, sloughs, a 400-acre cypress swamp, and around 47,000 tree islands that the Native Americans regard as sacred. As for animals, it’s full of alligators, bobcats, sandhill cranes, white tail deer, and 40 kinds of butterflies.
Not a lot of people know this, but the whole darn national wildlife refuge system started in Florida with a place near Vero Beach called Pelican Island.
Poachers were swarming the island to kill pelicans and use their feathers to decorate ladies’ hats. In 1903, a fledgling organization called the Audubon Society persuaded then-President Teddy Roosevelt to set that island aside as a refuge for the birds.
Soon the refuge idea spread all over the country, and then other countries copied the idea, creating their own refuges.
Florida alone has 29 national wildlife refuges, including one for manatees, one for Florida panthers, and one for Key deer. That’s the third most of any state, after California and North Dakota.
Now you want to cut their staff like it was just another interchangeable fast-food franchise location. But they’re not. They’re a rare piece of living American history that’s also good for preserving the environment.
Does this help you see what’s wrong with ripping up the refuge staff? I sure hope so.
But that’s not even the worst of what you’ve done. For that, we have to look further south.
The Everglades president?
Let me give you another little history lesson. In September 2020, that fellow you supposedly work for who owns a club in Palm Beach went to Jupiter and held a big event to declare his undying commitment to Everglades restoration.
Lots of Florida Republicans fell all over themselves praising him for this. Gov. Ron DeSastrous — er, excuse me, DeSantis — told reporters, “President Trump understands that restoring Florida’s Everglades is critical to the economic growth and well-being of our state.”
And Sen. Marco Rubio went so far as to predict he’d go down in history as the “Everglades President.”
Now, five years later, here you come trying to chop up the whole thing like it’s a slab of meat on a butcher’s block.
Not only are you laying off park rangers and scientists in Everglades National Park who’ve been working on the multibillion-dollar project that’s been going on for 25 years. It’s worse than that.
You’re also kicking people out of their offices.
“In its bid to cut costs, the Department of Government Efficiency has ended leases around the country, including at the Florida office staffed with hundreds of federal workers focused on Everglades restoration and maintaining beaches across the state,” the Miami Herald reported this week.
That would be the Jacksonville office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, their main HQ in Florida, which contains about 800 people. I’ve been there, Mr. Musk. I didn’t see any solid gold doorknobs or diamond encrusted toilets. Just a lot of hard-working people.
The Army’s lease on its Jacksonville offices is supposed to run until 2027, but your folks have notified the lessee that the federal government would now like to end it in August of this year. And exactly where will those hardworking but suddenly homeless engineers go next? No word on that one.
The Herald caught the irony in this move, by the way.
“The move to close down the Corps’ Florida headquarters comes amid a simultaneous federal push to send all remote workers back to the office,” the paper reported. “Dozens of federal employees near the Jacksonville office had already sought to work in person at the massive office in order to comply with the new directive.”
The Corps’ office is not the only important lease your flunkies want to fling into the garbage can. They also want to shutter the South Florida Natural Resources Center, which does the science for four national parks: Everglades, Big Cypress, Biscayne, and Dry Tortugas.
Losing these two offices would cause untold complications for the future of the River of Grass. First authorized by Congress and the Legislature in 2000, the Everglades restoration project is the largest environmental restoration ever, covering an area the size of New Jersey. After 25 years, we’re only now starting to see some results from the work, but there’s a lot more to do.
We just don’t have the time to make all these folks pack up their desks and move somewhere else.
“We’re especially concerned about those cuts,” Samples of Friends of the Everglades told me. “We want to keep Everglades restoration on track. This is a time for doubling down on restoration, not throwing up roadblocks.”
And Melissa Abdo, Sun Coast regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, made a similar point, reminding me that the Everglades restoration program has always drawn bipartisan support.
“It would be senseless to undermine this program just when we’ve started making some progress,” Abdo said. “We can’t advance the work of restoring the Everglades without these experts.”
There’s one more reason why these particular cuts of yours are a bad idea. The Everglades project isn’t just about fixing the damage done to the environment. It’s about keeping South Florida livable.
You know, that place where you and your boss live.
Keep the water flowing
The reason why there was such widespread support for Everglades restoration was that it didn’t just benefit the River of Grass.
It benefited the growing population of South Florida, too.
The destruction done to the Everglades in the mid-20th Century harmed the water supply for the growing population there. That’s why, when it came time to sell politicians on the fix, they were reassured that the restoration project would also guarantee the supply of fresh water for the booming cities on the Atlantic coast. They need 300 million gallons of water daily.
So, Mr. Musk, by jeopardizing Everglades restoration, you’re also jeopardizing the South Florida fresh water supply that makes the faucets and sprinklers at Mar-a-Lago work. I don’t think your boss is going to like that.
Here’s my suggestion. You should announce that your dumb DOGE made a mistake and America’s park rangers and other seashore and refuge employees will all be reinstated with full pay.
And then you very dramatically pull a wad of bills out of your own pocket and start peeling them off and laying them down like a Baptist deacon who hit the lottery and is filling up the offering plate.
You then announce that you, personally, are putting up $100 million to repair anything that’s needed to be fixed in the park system. Then, if there’s any money left over, it will be used to boost the rangers’ pay.
Oh, and whatever you do, do NOT finish up by throwing your right hand in the air. Do you Nazi how wrong that would be?
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.