Overflowing bathrooms. Illegal off-road driving through fragile habitats. Historic petroglyphs damaged beyond repair. Iconic Joshua trees chopped down.
Those were the impacts to national parks during the last federal shutdown in 2018, the longest in U.S. history, which lasted 35 days. With the federal government shutting down again, but national parks slated to remain open, advocates fear the situation may be worse because it comes after the Trump administration slashed staff.
The U.S. government officially shut down at midnight Wednesday after a deadlock between President Donald Trump and Congress over spending. Federal employees across the country were furloughed, including around 12,000 National Park Service employees.
That leaves around 3,000 employees to run the country’s 433 sites maintained by the agency. According to a park service contingency plan posted Tuesday, “park roads, lookouts, trails and open-air memorials will generally remain accessible to visitors” during the shutdown.
Staffing at each park will be based on the need to account “for the protection of life, property, and public health and safety, and will be based on the assumption that the NPS is conducting no park operations and providing no visitor services,” the document stated. However, even those employees deemed essential and kept working will not be paid during the shutdown.
“Keeping our national parks open after Trump and Republicans forced a government shutdown is stupid, short-sighted and incredibly dangerous,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “We’ve seen the irreparable harm that can happen when our parks go understaffed. Vandalism, trash and human waste will tarnish natural treasures that are the envy of the world. But apparently nothing says ‘Make America Great Again’ like turning Yosemite into one giant toilet.”
Visitors to national parks during the shutdown will be taking a risk, said Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers. Getting information from rangers on what remains open will be difficult, if not impossible, given the furloughs. And help for accident victims in national parks could be delayed.
Last week, Wade and 34 other former national park superintendents, sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum urging the government to close the parks in the event of a shutdown to prevent further degradation, warning that “the damage could in fact be much worse” compared to the last shutdown due to already limited staffing and leadership at parks.
“We just think that it’s unfair to the general public,” Wade added in an interview Wednesday.
Hours into the shutdown, parks across the country posted online that they would remain open, with some services limited or unavailable. But other sites are closing. Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in New Mexico was closed until further notice, citing “a lapse in appropriations.” On other government websites, the tone was more aggressive: “Radical Left Democrats shutdown the government,” reads one page for a national forest.
In a statement, U.S. Department of the Interior press secretary Aubrie Spady said the agency “will keep critical services open and running for the benefit of the American people despite efforts by Congressional Democrats who are trying to close our parks, stop U.S. energy production, and prevent our first responders like our law enforcement from keeping our streets safe and our wildland firefighters from fighting wildfires.”
She added that Interior “hopes Congressional Democrats will get serious and agree to fund the government because every day this shutdown continues it is hurting the American people even more.”
Republicans control Congress, but they did not strike a deal with Democrats to get the votes needed to keep the government running. Democrats were trying to avert sharp increases in health insurance premiums for millions of Americans.
The shutdown comes as the National Park Service already faces staffing issues. The Trump administration, via layoffs and buyouts, has cut 24 percent of the agency’s staff so far this year, with many superintendent positions and regional director positions filled by acting staff, Wade said. Trump and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, both signalled in the days leading up to the shutdown that the administration would use it to cut staffing further at agencies across the country.
It’s unclear how that will play out for the National Park Service. But conservation groups and former park staff are worried. In addition to any damage that occurs during the shutdown, both the park service and gateway communities around parks will take a financial hit.
According to the National Parks Conservation Association, around $1 million a day will be lost from fee revenues at sites, and nearby communities stand to lose $80 million in visitor spending.