This conversation aired in the May 15, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Click the button above to listen.
As summer time approaches, the busiest season for getting outside, National Parks are facing the biggest staff and budget cuts in history. The federal administration has radically reduced the workforce, leaving National Parks without a full staff to clean bathrooms, lead campfire programs, and keep bears from breaking into people’s picnic baskets. Now President Trump is proposing massive budget cuts, selling off of public lands, and even turning Alcatraz from a National Park back to a working prison.
Reporter Marissa Ortega-Welch, host of the podcast How Wild, sat down with Crosscurrents’ Sunni Khalid to share what she’s hearing from National Park rangers, biologists, and custodians about how this administration is affecting the nation’s public lands. In the short term, park staff warn of dirty bathrooms but in the long term, they worry about the lasting damage these cuts will have to the landscape.
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Transcript:
CROSSCURRENTS HOST, SUNNI KHALID: Every day there are new headlines about cuts to federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. These cuts have come to the National Park and Forest Service too. And as summer approaches, the busiest season for visiting national parks, how are these cuts going to affect people in the Bay Area and around California? Here to tell us more is KALW's Marissa Ortega-Welch, host of the podcast, How Wild. Good morning, Marissa.
REPORTER MARISSA ORTEGA-WELCH: Good morning, Sunni.
KHALID: You've been reporting on public lands for years. For How Wild you interviewed Park and Forest Service rangers and biologists across the West, so I understand you reached back to your contacts. What are you hearing from these people?
ORTEGA-WELCH: Yeah, I have been talking to so many people–custodians, rangers, wildlife biologists, habitat restoration specialists across the Bay Area and the West. So Golden Gate National Recreation Area here in San Francisco, Pinnacles, which is down south of us, Yosemite and in places like Colorado and New Mexico. And people are eager to talk. But they do not want to talk on the record because people are fearful of their jobs right now. I mean, a lot of people have been fired, and those that haven't yet are basically waiting every day to hear if they might be.
KHALID: Catch us up on these staff cuts because I've been hearing that a lot of rangers who were on duty last year are not there this year.
ORTEGA-WELCH: Well, it started in January. President Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk at the helm. And the explicit goal is to shrink the size of the federal government and to privatize as much as possible. So that sparked waves of firings at a lot of federal agencies including the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife and Bureau of Land Management. At the same time, budgets have been frozen. There's been a hiring freeze, and people have been offered voluntary buyouts and early retirement options. So there's a concerted effort to push people out and reduce the staff as much as possible.
KHALID: You've gotten to know a lot of these people. What does it mean in terms of actual numbers of people cut?
ORTEGA-WELCH: It's hard to exact numbers. The numbers are changing every day, but we are looking at maybe more than 10% of the Park Service and Forest Service have been cut. And we're seeing similar cuts, maybe more like 5% to 10% at Fish and Wildlife and Bureau of Land Management.
And there's another wave of staff cuts that was supposed to be put into effect this week. But a federal judge just ordered a pause to that because many unions and other groups are saying that these firings are actually illegal.
KHALID: That's a lot of people lost. How has it affected the park's ability to stay open, especially with the big tourist season coming up?
ORTEGA-WELCH: Well, around March, national parks started announcing they weren't going to be able to keep everything open, given these staffing cuts. So Yosemite National Park didn't open up its campgrounds for reservations. Sequoia National Park reduced the hours for its visitor centers and canceled ranger programs. And this was happening in parks across the country.
It was met with a lot of backlash from the public. Americans love their national parks. So the Secretary of the Interior then turned around and told the national parks, you have to remain open. So visitor centers are back to normal hours at Sequoia. Yosemite just opened its campgrounds for reservations today.
So parks are being told to keep services open despite these staffing cuts.
KHALID: How are they able to do that?
ORTEGA-WELCH: That's what staff are trying to figure out. There's two things I'm hearing. One is people are saying this is an all hands on deck situation. You know, people who don't normally maintain bathrooms are going to carry toilet paper around in their rigs with them this summer, so they can, you know, restock the bathrooms that run out of toilet paper. You know, these are people who do this work because they love it. It's mission driven work and these people want to be good stewards of these places. But I'm also hearing that people are feeling frustrated. They're saying that they're being asked to do way more with way less, and it feels like an impossible task.
The other thing is there's things that we visitors might notice this summer, like dirtier bathrooms or less ranger programs, but then there's the things we might miss. I talked to one biologist who said, you know, you might notice more dog poop on the trail in a place like the Golden Gate National Recreation Area this summer. But what you might not notice are the invasive plants growing on the side of that trail that won't get pulled out because they don't have the staff to do that, right? So this is the biological work, the conservation work, the wildlife work, climate change study work.
And that type of work is an equally important part of the park's mission, and when that kind of work doesn't happen, that could have lasting damage to the landscape.
KHALID: OK, staff cuts are one thing, but we're also talking about more proposed budget cuts, right?
ORTEGA-WELCH: Yes, in Trump's proposed budget plan, he proposed cutting the National Park Service by $900 million. That's about a 25% cut to the park's budget. It's a huge cut. The National Parks Conservation Association crunched the numbers. And to make that math work, we're not just talking about belt tightening at parks. We would very likely see entire national parks have to close. I mean, potentially hundreds of some of the smaller national parks, national historic sites would have to close.
It’s a massive cut and to put this in perspective, the national park’s budget overall is one-fifteenth of 1% of the overall federal budget. So not even one percent of the federal budget, one-fifteenth of 1%. So the national park's budget is not a significant part of the overall federal budget.
KHALID: Why are they doing this?
ORTEGA-WELCH: Well, it is, you know, ostensibly being done in the name of efficiency. But a lot of park service employees have told me they feel like they are purposefully being set up to fail so that the government could then turn around and say, “See, the government can't handle running these places, let's turn them over to private companies or states instead.” I talked to a former California park superintendent who told me that there are some people in this administration who if they could sell off Yosemite to Six Flags, they would. And that's not just a theory. House Republicans have just tried to include selling off Bureau of Land Management land in Utah and Nevada as part of the budget reconciliation bill. And the Department of the Interior and Department of Housing formed a joint committee to look at the potential of using public lands around cities like Reno and Las Vegas for housing instead. So this is a real conversation that's happening about transferring off or selling some of public lands.
KHALID: Well, that's a perfect segue because we have a case a little bit close to us at the Presidio where Trump has ordered the selling of federal lands. And this includes our Presidio, which is one of my favorite places in San Francisco.
ORTEGA-WELCH: Yes, that made a lot of headlines here. It received a lot of outcry. There were also similar headlines about the idea of turning Alcatraz, which is part of the national park, back into a working prison. So that would receive a lot of pushback in a place like the Bay Area. But in a place, like Utah or Nevada, where you have state senators who support the selling off of public land, these things could legitimately happen. And even here in California, where there's more political support for public lands, there still could be this slow creep happening. So that could look like more private concessionaires taking over campgrounds to run them instead of the National Park Service. Or it could look like contracting out biologists' work to contractors. The issue with that is that the federal government can then say, “Look, these companies can do it better than we can, so let's just let them do it.”
And my question is: what does that do to the missions of these places as public land if they're instead being run potentially by for-profit companies?
KHALID: It's been about 10 years since I went to Yosemite with my late mother and my sister and we had a great time. I was planning on going back this summer. Should I even be visiting the national parks right now? Is it safe?
ORTEGA-WELCH: It is safe. I'm still planning on visiting national parks this year, but the safety question is valid. I mean, the administration did not cut firefighters or emergency medical services. In fact, there is a proposed budget increase to firefighters. But you know, those aren't the only people that are involved in a fire or an emergency, right? When you have a fire that breaks out, it's all hands on deck. It's not just the firefighters. It's the people who handle logistics, who help with communication. I mean, you have rangers who will go out and walk the trails and help divert hikers and say, “Hey, there's a fire up ahead. You need to change your plans.” If you've been out backpacking like I do for a couple of days, you will have no idea there's fire, right? You need people to be relaying those messages.
The other thing that is being cut are the people who help prevent the wildfires, right? People on habitat restoration crews or trail crews who go in and remove some of that dead and downed wood that could contribute to an even more severe fire. And in a park like Golden Gate National Recreation Area, that area could see a fire as severe as the ones we saw in LA. It's a park right next to a lot of housing in Marin. And so to be reducing the number of people who help prevent wildfires in a time like this is really concerning.
KHALID: Well, what advice are you getting from some of the people you talk to with the national parks if someone wants to go hiking or camping this summer? What are they telling you?
ORTEGA-WELCH: Bring toilet paper, that's what everyone's saying. Be patient and flexible. Pick up after yourself. Don't contribute trash to an already overflowing trash can. Follow wildfire regulations. This is not the time to be starting a wildfire. Stay within your comfort zone. This is the time not to be getting lost or doing something risky. So a lot of this is stuff that we should all be doing anyway, but you should be prepared to be a little bit more self-sufficient.
You know, national park and forest staff are also telling me if listeners care about public lands, they should be calling their representatives and letting them know that they're concerned about these staff cuts and about these proposed budget cuts.
The one thing I want to add is to be extra nice to Park and Forest Service and public land workers this year. When you're out camping, hiking, recreating, say thank you because they are having a very tough year.
KHALID: Well, I would be remiss as a colleague and a friend if I did not mention that How Wild won a Murrow Award for a podcast.
ORTEGA-WELCH: Thank you for the congratulations, the award is very nice. It is interesting though to be reporting right now on public lands when no one will talk to me on the record. I mean, understandably, people are very fearful for their jobs. And so it's interesting to be reflecting on the first season of How Wild. I couldn't produce that right now. People wouldn't go on the records and talk to be right now, even about things that aren't under threat of being cut.
I mean, the other thing we haven't talked about yet is in addition to these staff and budget cuts, the executive orders that direct what federal workers can say about gender, about sexual orientation, and about American history, those affect national parks as well. National parks are used to tell the American story. So staff at these national parks are feeling like they're being censored right now in their ability to tell the full story of the history of these national parks. So there's a group called the Resistance Rangers and it’s off-duty park rangers who have organized both protests in the national parks, protesting these staff and budget cuts, but they're also on their website trying to archive some of these stories that are lost. A lot of national park websites will have a history section with notable people from the national park and people who identify as queer or trans. Those people are being removed from these national park web sites. And the Resistance Rangers are working to archive those stories on their own website to keep being able to tell that part of the national parks’ history.
KHALID: Thank you, Marissa.
ORTEGA-WELCH: Thank you Sunni.
