An entrance to Mount Rainier National Park. (Photo by Cristy Sotelo/Getty Images)
About half a dozen employees at each of Washington’s three national parks are believed to have been laid off as part of the Trump administration’s government-wide push to slash staff.
Mount Rainier and North Cascades national parks each saw six employees let go last week, while Olympic National Park lost five, said Bill Wade, the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers.
It’s been difficult for anyone to figure out the extent of layoffs at Washington’s parks. Even the park superintendents have been kept mostly in the dark. Wade got information from “reliable sources, such as other employees in the parks, or from one who is terminated and knows how many others in the park were terminated.”
The cuts at Mount Rainier included the popular park’s only plumber, Wade said Thursday.
The Trump administration also laid off one employee at the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area in northeast Washington, Wade said.
Nationwide, more than 1,000 National Park Service probationary employees have been let go as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken a buzzsaw to the federal workforce in recent weeks.
About 3,400 U.S. Forest Service workers have also lost their jobs. Hundreds of employees in the Forest Service’s Region 6 in Washington and Oregon are among them. This included chopping the team that manages the Enchantments in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness from 13 people to three, according to the Washington Trails Association.
Gregg Bafundo was the lead wilderness ranger at the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest until last Friday. He’d been with the Forest Service for nearly a decade, but a recent promotion turned him into a probationary employee — a category that includes federal workers who’ve only been in their jobs a year or two.
“In the simplest terms, we save lives, we protect our environment, we protect the American people and the very dirt that our country is built upon,” Bafundo told reporters Wednesday. “I’ve saved lives dangling off of cliffs in the North Cascades. I saved a life of a cardiac patient on the Naches loop trail just outside Mount Rainier National Park.”
National parks elsewhere have already started to see the consequences of a reduced workforce. For example, lines to get into Grand Canyon National Park this weekend were twice as long as usual, with some people waiting 90 minutes to enter, The Washington Post reported.
Winter is a slower time of year for Washington’s national parks so the immediate effects are less clear. But as spring and summer approach and more visitors flock to the parks, trouble could come, said Rob Smith, the northwest regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association.
“It creates a very uncertain future for our national parks,” Smith said, questioning “whether facilities like bathrooms will have enough rangers to clean them, whether someone will be at visitor centers or search and rescue will be adequate.” It could also mean closed campgrounds and trails.
More immediately, Smith wondered whether Mount Rainier would have enough snowplow operators to keep the road open to the beloved Paradise area on the south side of the park.
The layoffs come as the nation’s parks are growing in popularity. Mount Rainier, for example, had nearly 2.5 million visitors last year, up from less than 1.9 million a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the Park Service’s workforce had already dropped significantly in the past decade.
At the North Cascades National Park, advocates had previously been sounding the alarm over lack of staffing. The North Cascades Conservation Council recently circulated a petition to reopen the visitor center in Stehekin after it was indefinitely shuttered last year.
Even less staff could mean increased risks for the backcountry travelers who venture into the park, known for its remote terrain and glaciated peaks.
“It is appalling to us to see the Park Service, known as ‘America’s best idea,’ gutted of staff crucial to the visitor experience by what will doubtless be known as ‘America’s worst idea,’” the conservation council’s president, Phil Fenner, wrote in an email.
The Park Service didn’t respond to a request for comment on the number of people laid off in Washington.