The fed’s mass layoffs may pave the way for more fires and less visitors in national parks

There was a protest this past Saturday outside of Rocky Mountain National Park, not too far from KGNU’s Boulder Studios. Hundreds showed up at around 10:30 in the morning and stayed for hours, showing their support for the national park and its employees with loud chants and colorful signs.

Nearly every single person told KGNU’s Alex Lauria that they are very worried for fire season, specifically.

Those worries come from the layoff of at least a thousand federal workers who work in the National Park Service system. The crowd at that protest was full of folks from all across the Front Range, including lots of recently laid off workers.

It was one of many protests at parks and public lands across the nation. The Trump administration has recently fired at least 1, 000 probationary, or relatively newer to the job, National Park Service employees as part of its efforts to downsize the government. The plan is being led by Elon Musk and his new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, working to find and eliminate excess federal spending.

However, in the midst of all the layoffs and confusion, the Park Service now says it’s reinstating about 5, 000 seasonal jobs that were initially rescinded last month. The layoffs were a part of a spending freeze ordered by President Donald Trump, according to the Associated Press. All of that is leaving thousands upon thousands of current and former parks employees, avid park visitors, local governments, and more concerned about how the parks will function with a fraction of the permanent staff they previously had.

To discuss these concerns and speak about the future of our public lands, KGNU’s Jackie Sedley and Greta Kerkhoff spoke to Gregor MacGregor, an assistant teaching professor at CU who focuses on environmental law and policy, and Adam Auerbach, who worked as a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park.

“ I think we all have an obligation to make sure we are as generous as possible with these people who are under attack right now for the crime of wanting to serve us all,” said Auerbach, about the still-employed workers at now-significantly understaffed parks.

“You’re going to remove the one biologist you had, who was necessary to do a biological assessment for a new trail; you’re going to lose the ability to do the kinds of archeological surveys, that you need to do to put in a new trail; you’re going to lose the myriad number of people who know how to plan for recreation, or plan for fire mitigation, or any of the other functions of our public lands into the future,” said MacGregor. “So it’ll have a compounding effect that even if we were to completely return to staff levels in four years, our public lands are already behind in a lot of these things because of that reduction.”

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