A black bear squeezes under the main viewing platform at the Tongass National Forest’s Anan Wildlife Observatory on Aug. 2, 2018. The observatory is located 30 miles southeast of the town of Wrangell. Anan Creek has the largest run of pink salmon in Southeast Alaska, which supports the high density of black and brown bears. (Photo by Paul Robbins Jr./U.S. Forest Service)
On a sunny summer day in the early 1990s, a young woman in a wide brim hat presented our young children with a gift from the retreating Mendenhall Glacier. The National Forest Service ranger gently placed a dripping shard of iceberg in their little hands. “This ice is at least 150 years old,” she said.
The first ranger on my childhood radar screen was a bear holding a shovel named Smokey. Since 1944, Smokey’s been a poster bear for wildfire prevention.
Rangers in ranger hats are what we want to be when we grow up. They get to live and work in national parks and forests, help protect wildlife and keep visitors safe, the quintessential good guys and gals.
But an unconscionable thing is happening to thousands of federal workers, including those who run national parks, forests and public lands. They all are receiving the same letter from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency: ”The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment with the Agency would be in the public interest. For this reason, the Agency informs you that the Agency is removing you from the position.”
In fact, their work is in nothing but the public interest, for minimal pay. Many do it for the love of the job, the outdoors and the people they serve.
Without cause or common sense, our fellow Americans are being summarily dismissed from their jobs by an unelected, unregulated and illegal de facto fourth branch of the federal government.
They are the gracious stewards of national treasures — the seashores, forests, deserts and monuments that hold the knowledge of the first peoples to inhabit these protected and public lands. The faces of the nation to visitors from all over the world.
Here in the capital of Alaska, this includes almost all staff who host hundreds of thousands of cruise ship passengers and independent travelers seeking a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the Mendenhall Glacier. These are the people who manage a bustling visitor center, demonstrate how to watch a mother bear catch the family dinner from a safe distance, and enlighten local children on the magnificent icefield at our doorstep. Whether the visitor center will stay open is uncertain just six weeks before the arrival of the first cruise ship.
Many of the fired employees are probationary. Those who work for the Forest Service make up about 10% of the 1,378 federal workers under probationary status in Alaska, from newly hired workers to long term employees in their first year of a promotion. In the Southeast region, rangers in Misty Fjords National Monument; cabins and trails crew in Sitka; and fisheries technicians and tribal liaisons in Petersburg and Wrangell lost their jobs along with those at the Mendenhall Glacier.
A federal judge recently ruled that mass firings of probationary employees are illegal. These employees include folks who repair, renovate and maintain heavily used public use cabins and trails. They empty the outhouses, and for those that don’t follow the “leave no trace” ethic of pack it in/pack it out, carry garbage out of the wilderness on their backs.
Juneau singer-songwriter and open mic host Quinton Woolman Morgan was part of a Forest Service crew that maintained cabins from Skagway to the Taku Glacier. “We were taking care of the bathrooms, replacing the decks and windows, cleaning out the stoves, helping out with trails. There’s a lot to it that people don’t think about. And there will be an impact from so many people losing their positions,” he said.
Funding for the Forest Service and national parks constitutes less than 1% of the federal budget.
Even staunch supporters of President Trump are scratching their heads, deeming access to national forests, safe trails and recreational areas “apolitical” on the online forum Reddit. The Park Service is well regarded by both Republicans and Democrats, earning the highest rating of any government agency in a 2024 poll by Pew Research.
But so far, Sen. Lisa Murkowski is the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to point out that losing these workers is bad news for both Alaska’s tourism industry and economy.
Documentary producer Ken Burns famously quoted historian and writer Wallace Stegner, “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”
Sadly, the current leadership of our country is insisting on our worst.
Government can always be run more efficiently, but this administration is barking up the wrong tree.
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