What the public doesn’t see in national park budget cuts

Over the last few months, we’ve covered how budget cutting and staff shortages have affected our national parks. A frequent comment that we see from readers runs something like this: “We just visited XXX National Park, and things looked good to us. The bathrooms were clean, trash cans emptied, no understaffing.” Some have written that we’re publishing “Chicken Little” stories—that the sky is falling. Yes, the front-facing part of our nation’s parks may indeed look sparkly clean. But there’s another side. It’s the national parks’ budget cuts’ hidden impact.

Visitors seeing clean bathrooms, operating campgrounds, and empty trash cans is no surprise. It’s in line with the order of the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum. Even as the visitor season drew near, Burgum ordered, “[T]o ensure visitor access and satisfaction, any closures or reductions to operating hours, seasons, or any visitor services (including trails and campgrounds), in whole or in part, must be reviewed by the NPS Director and the Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks prior to any reduction action by the individual park units.”

With cuts in staffing, the result has been park managers pulling staff out of their usual work to handle privy-cleaning duty. Campgrounds must be kept open, trails accessible. But what happens to the other important—but unseen—work of employees who are now “keeping up appearances”?

National parks’ budget cuts’ hidden impact, in the eyes of a rescue worker

What follows is the writing of a former park service search and rescue worker. Regardless of your political persuasion, we think it’s a critical read. While EMTs are not being fired, when a medical emergency arises, more folks than just EMTs are called on to handle this critical work. If they aren’t there to be had, what happens to those who need help?

This story originally appeared in the California Health Report and was written by Lauren DeLaunay Miller. [Reprinted here with permission.]

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I spent three summers providing emergency services as part of Yosemite National Park’s Search and Rescue team. I hiked harder and faster than I ever had, eager to reach my patients as quickly as possible. It felt like my fitness determined my patients’ outcomes, and sometimes it did.

But something else also mattered: Having enough team members who were well supported.

Parks received bipartisan support

For decades, national parks have received widespread, bipartisan support. But now, these services are under threat. Emergency medical services look different in every park, but one thing is now the same: The systems that NPS visitors, residents and employees have come to rely on are on shaky ground under the Trump administration. Despite announcing on April 3 that all national parks remain open, the administration’s actions under the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have led to staffing shortages in many NPS areas – with potentially more to come. Even for employees who have remained, the administration’s decisions have created a culture of fear and uncertainty.

And while EMS workers have, for now, been exempted from budget cuts and buyout options, parks often pull employees from a variety of divisions to supplement rescue missions, so a shortage of staff members in other departments could impact emergency services too.

 ”If a big emergency goes down or somebody gets lost or there’s a big rescue, it’s not just those public safety employees that get involved,” Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, told me.

Staff feeling the impact

Parks employees are already feeling the impact: There is no sense of security for what employment might look like next year or next summer, Wade added. The administration’s rapid decision-making and backtracking make it more difficult for NPS employees to feel confident that the work they’ve come to rely on each summer season will continue to be there.

Many units of the NPS supplement their permanent staff with seasonal employees to account for increased visitation during the busy summer season. Wade worries that the hiring of seasonal workers may mask the underlying staffing shortages this summer before becoming apparent to visitors in the fall once many of the seasonal employees have left. “What happens when all of those 7,700 seasonal employees go off duty in the early fall and you already now have a vastly reduced permanent set of employees?” he asked. “That’s where things are going to start being obvious, I think, to the public.”

Mental health among EMTs

EMS work, in national parks or elsewhere, takes a toll on everyone who does it. In recent years, NPS units like Yosemite have invested more in training and resources to help emergency responders grapple with the difficulties of their work. But with budget cuts coming, it’s unclear if parks will be able to invest as heavily in mental health resources. “It’s all part of that big set of uncertainty,” Wade said.

That sense of uncertainty can take a large toll on EMS workers’ already-taxed mental health, something that Dr. Eric Rudnick, emergency medicine and EMS physician, said he’s seen emergency medicine organizations fail to adequately address for decades. Rudnick has worked in EMS for more than 30 years and now uses his expertise to advocate for EMS workers in rural California as a director with the CARESTAR Foundation. When asked how mental health was addressed when he entered the industry, Rudnick said, “You compartmentalize it, and you stuff it down. And that’s not a whole healthy coping mechanism.”

The question, Rudnick said, is: “Who’s going to rescue the rescuer?”

“ I used to tell students that we’re like grief mops,” added Jane Smith, a paramedic who has worked in urban EMS in Oakland and San Francisco for decades and serves as the CARESTAR Foundation secretary.

Not just national parks

The time I spent in Yosemite was foundational to becoming the person, and journalist, I am today. I learned how to sit with people in crisis and how to care for others on what were often the worst days of their lives. I also learned about the intricate web of emergency medical services that the NPS provides to its hundreds of millions of visitors. Emergency services aren’t just limited to responding to accidents related to extreme outdoor activities like those I saw in Yosemite. They also include everyday emergencies, like heart attacks, illnesses, car accidents and domestic violence incidents.

I trained in everything from swift-water rescue to wildland firefighting, but our specialty in Yosemite was in high-angle rescue, or retrieving climbers from the Valley’s famously imposing granite walls. By the time I left the National Park Service in the fall of 2020, I had participated in nearly 100 rescue missions.

Yosemite alone received more than 4 million visits in 2024, and the Park Service isn’t limited to just parks — it includes national parkways, seashores and historic sites as well. California leads the U.S. in the number of NPS locations, with 28 sites, including well-known parks like Death Valley and Joshua Tree as well as smaller spots like Manzanar National Historic Site and César E. Chávez National Monument. More than 17 million people visit these California landmarks each year, and San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area receives more people than any other site in the NPS system.

National Park Service budget–less than 1/15th of a percent

Despite being overwhelmingly popular with the American public, the NPS takes up less than one-fifteenth of a percent of the federal budget. In February, the administration laid off approximately 1,000 NPS employees across the country, at least 42 of whom worked for parks in California, according to a count by the Association of National Park Rangers. Then came a federal hiring freeze that prohibited the hiring of seasonal staff for the summer in addition to challenges to the system that supports search and rescue efforts like those in Yosemite.

Many of those decisions were challenged in court, and widespread outrage prompted reversals. For a moment, things looked a little brighter, as the NPS was allowed to hire seasonal staff and, in late March, a judge ruled that the laid-off employees must be rehired.

Still, the administration is offering another round of buyouts to NPS employees. Notably, wildland firefighters, emergency responders, law enforcement rangers and dispatchers are all exempt from the buyout options, signaling an understanding by the administration that the parks simply cannot function without these critical skillsets.

National parks budget cuts hidden impact—morale

Wade and I agree that, in the eyes of visitors, these changes may not be perceptible this summer. But one of the biggest impacts, Wade said, lies in the culture of fear and uncertainty that’s permeated the NPS.

“The morale in the National Park Service right now is as low as it’s ever, ever been, and it’s probably going to get lower,” he said.

Emergency responders work hard. This I know firsthand. We respond to pagers at all hours of the day, putting our lives on hold to protect those of others. We stop what we’re doing and help, not knowing if we’ll be gone for hours or days. In Yosemite, the seasonal search and rescue sites supplement the park’s seasonal and permanent employees, relying on a system called administratively determined hiring that allows for the temporary hiring of emergency personnel. This system, too, has been targeted by the administration.

What’s to be done about the national parks budget cuts hidden impact?

What can be done? “Please tell the public to get in touch with their elected representatives and demand that they do something,” Wade said.

A “fully staffed” national park is one in which important and beloved programs are often already supplemented by outside organizations. The emergency responders whom visitors and residents rely on during their times of crisis need more resources, more mental health relief, more team members, and more respect. It is a system that deserves more support, not less.

Lauren DeLaunay Miller is a reporter with California Health Report as part of the California Local News Fellowship at UC Berkeley. From 2018-2020, she worked for Yosemite National Park’s Search and Rescue team in Yosemite Valley, where she assisted in approximately 100 rescues. The opinions expressed in this story are hers. 

This story originally appeared in the California Health Report. 

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