(Illustration by Joshua Haiar/South Dakota Searchlight)
If Dan Wenk had been fired during his first year in a permanent job with the National Park Service, the agency would’ve lost his many later accomplishments.
He would not have gone on to help lead a public-private partnership that raised $75 million to redevelop visitor facilities at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, or a $300 million negotiation to improve amenities at Yellowstone National Park with private funds, or the acquisition of the United Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania for a national memorial.
Wenk worked on those and other momentous projects during a four-decade career that began with his first permanent job as a landscape architect at Yellowstone.
Now he wonders how many potentially decades-long careers were extinguished on Feb. 14. That’s when the Trump administration fired 1,000 park service employees — about 5% of the agency’s workforce — who had yet to complete the probationary period for new hires. Another 700 employees reportedly accepted buyouts that were offered before the firings.
“The feeder groups are being devastated in terms of future leaders of an organization,” Wenk said.
Wenk and fellow former park service superintendents Cheryl Schreier and Mike Pflaum recently visited South Dakota Searchlight to express their concerns about the Trump administration’s mass firings and spending cuts, carried out largely by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. The actions have affected many federal agencies and programs, resulting in a reported 75,000 employee buyouts, 30,000 firings, and trillions of dollars in frozen or canceled federal grants, loans and foreign aid.
Wenk, Pflaum and Schreier each retired in South Dakota’s Black Hills after decades-long careers culminating in the leadership of major park service sites, including Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone for Wenk, Mount Rushmore for Schreier, and Badlands National Park for Pflaum. Wenk’s other postings included a stint as acting director of the park service.
Schreier is now the vice chair of The Coalition to Protect America’s Parks, and Pflaum is the president-elect of the Association of National Park Rangers.
All three started as seasonal park service employees, like some of the recently fired workers did.
‘My career is over’
Wenk said starting as a seasonal worker is a common park service career path, and it’s an important thing to know about the probationary workers who lost their jobs.
“They may have been in the park service for many, many years,” Wenk said, “and had finally gotten a permanent position.”
Schreier’s first permanent job was working as a protection ranger, securing the Liberty Bell and other historical treasures at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. Pflaum got his first permanent job at Yellowstone, where he worked as a telecommunications operator in the dispatch center.
Recently fired employees in those types of positions might never get back on a career track that could have led to leadership. That includes Lydia Jones, who was fired from her first permanent park service job last month at Badlands National Park after working as a seasonal ranger in multiple parks for several years.
“I’m devastated,” Jones wrote on social media, adding “my career is over.”
Pflaum formerly worked with Jones at Badlands National Park.
“She was obviously a rising star,” Pflaum said. “She was very good, very articulate, doing interpretive programs and managing the visitor center desk. And she got fired for ‘poor performance,’ which is absolutely untrue.”
Pflaum said he’s spoken with many current and retired park service employees in the past few weeks, and employees who were fired.
“There’s absolutely an atmosphere of stress, anxiety and fear throughout the ranks,” he said. “And that’s not a good thing for mission accomplishment.”
‘It is going to have an impact this summer’
In the short term, mission accomplishment means hiring seasonal employees to staff many of the 433 park service sites that cover 133,000 square miles across the country. In South Dakota, park service locations include such well-known destinations as Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument and Minuteman Missile National Historic Site.
The Trump/DOGE cuts have introduced chaos into the typically predictable seasonal hiring process. Trump ordered a federal hiring freeze in January, reportedly resulting in rescinded job offers for some seasonal park service workers.
After the mass firings on Feb. 14 and a public outcry, the Trump administration said it would hire back at least 50 of the park service jobs and authorize 5,000 seasonal positions, which would’ve been a reduction from recent years. Then the administration relented again and authorized 7,700 seasonal workers.
Wenk, Pflaum and Schreier said the confusion and delays will make filling seasonal jobs difficult. They said many seasonal workers may have been scared away or taken other jobs by now. Those that are hired could end up behind schedule with background checks and training. And they might lack permanent employees to train them because of the mass firings.
Wenk said visitors could suffer the consequences. Park service sites collectively receive more than 300 million visits per year.
“I think it is going to have an impact this summer,” Wenk said, “especially as people start arriving in parks in the numbers that they traditionally do, and they expect the same kind of experience. It’s not going to be there for them.”
‘You could lose something forever’
One of the experiences that could fall away is programming. At Mount Rushmore, summer programs include ranger talks, presidential reenactors and Native American dancers. The mountain carving receives more than 2 million visitors per year, and on some days, the crowds are overwhelming. Wenk said parks could be overwhelmed more often this summer due to staffing shortages.
“If it got crowded, we used to put a sign out — ‘cut the programs’ — because we’ve got to get people through here faster,” Wenk said. “So there aren’t going to be programs available for them to take advantage of.”
Other problems could range from insufficiently cleaned bathrooms to inadequate emergency response times, the former superintendents said. Pflaum worries about safety.
“Lots of people, unfortunately, become ill or injured or lost or need rescue in our parks,” he said. “I don’t think those things will be non-existent, but will they be somehow delayed because of fewer rangers? Could lives hang in the balance? I don’t know, but I think those are potential impacts.”
Schreier said additional problems might be less visible and longer-term in nature, but ultimately devastating to the park service. They could include reductions in the scientific research that goes on behind the scenes in many parks, on topics ranging from geology and paleontology to invasive and endangered species.
“So if you don’t have those individuals who are working on that, or the inventory and monitoring of those resources,” Schreier said, “there may be years of data, and all of a sudden they’re not collecting that data anymore.”
The most serious danger is to the parks themselves, Wenk said, from having fewer people protecting the treasures they contain.
“A lot of the resources in the National Park Service are fragile, whether they be natural resources or cultural resources,” he said. “And if you don’t have the people to protect them, you could lose something forever.”
South Dakota Searchlight, like the Capital Chronicle, is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.