Overflowing toilets. Injured hikers stranded in the backcountry. Closed visitor centers. Those are just a few of the nightmare scenarios that are likely looming for the nation’s 433 national parks and sites, said Kurt Repanshek, the founder and editor of National Parks Traveler.

“It’s a slow-moving storm,” he said of the devastating cuts the National Park Service has suffered under the new Trump administration. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have taken a chainsaw (literally, in the case of Musk’s recent appearance at a conservative conference) to the federal bureaucracy, and the men and women who toil on the nation’s public lands—scientists, rangers, educators—have not been immune from the measures. The cuts are supposed to be saving American taxpayers billions of dollars but seem so far to have produced little more than a deepening sense of outrage. 

“The way they're going about it is crazy,” Repanshek said, describing a haphazard approach low on communication, specifics, and clarity. Such reports have been consistent across the sprawling federal bureaucracy, from the now-shuttered United States Agency for International Development to the National Institutes of Health. 

The NPS runs everything from lavish hotels like the Ahwahnee in Yosemite to primitive grounds deep in the Blue Ridge backcountry. It tracks coyote populations and rescues tourists who decide that July is the perfect time for a Death Valley off-roading adventure. It conducts scientific studies and teaches children to ride horses. And now they will have to do that, and much more, under a presidential administration that fundamentally sees government workers as shiftless—and dispensable.

Among those now without a job is Yosemite’s sole locksmith. According to the Associated Press, “at least a dozen” other employees at Yosemite were dismissed. In a show of solidarity, their colleagues climbed El Capitan—a sheer cliff that is one of the world’s most renowned climbing destinations—and hung an upside-down American flag from its precipice. 

Musk’s DOGE—which has been operating in a constitutional gray zone, seemingly answerable to no one but Trump himself—has ordered 1,000 jobs cut across the NPS, which employs about 20,000 people overall. The NPS will be allowed to hire 5,000 seasonal employees, but that can’t compensate for the experience of the full-time workers who were dismissed with a short, unceremonious, and impersonal email that called their performance into question. 

"Before I could fully print off my government records, I was locked out of my email and unable to access my personal and professional records. The process was utterly chaotic and continued weeks of trauma as a government employee in the new administration.”

“Without any type of formal notice, my position was ripped out from under my feet at 4 p.m. on a cold snowy Friday,” Brian Gibbs, who worked at the Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, wrote in an email. “Before I could fully print off my government records, I was locked out of my email and unable to access my personal and professional records. The process was utterly chaotic and continued weeks of trauma as a government employee in the new administration.”

Despite superb performance reviews, Robert Prather was terminated from his job as a case manager in New Mexico at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which works closely with the NPS. Much like Gibbs and hundreds of their former colleagues across the country, Prather was outraged by the implication that his performance has been subpar, and he was crushed to leave behind work he found deeply fulfilling.

“I am extremely saddened by what has unfolded,” he wrote in an email. “Like many of us in FWS, I have wanted a career with FWS ever since I was a young child. I've spent my life developing the skills, knowledge, and capabilities to be an asset to the FWS. After working for over 11 months with the FWS, I was beyond certain that I had found my dream job. I cherished the work that I was able to do. It was an absolute privilege to protect and restore our fish and wildlife. Unfortunately, all of that has been ripped away from me.”

Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director and one of the main architects of the conservative manifesto known as Project 2025, appears to have sought precisely such a response. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” the combative Christian nationalist has said. 

All this comes as winter recedes and people begin to make spring and summer travel plans. There were 325.5 million visitors to the national parks in 2023, the last year for which data are available. That figure represents a rise of 4 percent from 2022. According to 2023 data, visits begin to rise in March (5 million), peaking in July (13.8 million). Overcrowding has become a serious problem. More frequent spells of extreme heat have also presented new challenges in desert terrains like Death Valley and Joshua Tree, where rescue teams routinely have to execute complicated operations to save stranded hikers.

Project 2025—which Trump renounced during the presidential campaign, only to seemingly embrace it now that he is back in the Oval Office—calls for the Department of the Interior, which runs both the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, to pivot from conservation to energy extraction.

And now, there will be fewer employees to head off those challenges. “If you’ve planned your bucket list trip to a national park, you may have to take into consideration that you won’t have the full experience and reschedule for next year in the hopes it gets better,” Kristen Brengel of the National Parks Conservation Association told The New York Times.

Project 2025—which Trump renounced during the presidential campaign, only to seemingly embrace it now that he is back in the Oval Office—calls for the Department of the Interior, which runs both the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, to pivot from conservation to energy extraction. “Mandate for Leadership,” the 900-page Project 2025 game plan, seeks a “restoration of the department’s historic role managing the nation’s vast storehouse of hydrocarbons, much of which is yet to be discovered.” 

In 2018, the National Parks Conservation Association found that 68 parks or sites “could be harmed” by the first Trump administration’s proposal to expand offshore drilling. Given that the second Trump administration has hewed to the same line about expanding domestic oil and gas production, drilling in or around national parks remains a very real possibility. (BLM, which manages open lands across the West, will be run by Kathleen Sgamma, an energy industry booster; her boss, Interior secretary and former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, has already moved to make it easier to drill in national monuments.)

National parks contribute some $55 billion to the US economy, according to the NPS, but if the current tumult keeps people away during the upcoming high season, that number could plummet. Ordinary Americans who run small businesses—concession stands, guided tours, motels—will pay the price. 

Already the effects of Musk’s cuts are being felt. At Zion National Park in Utah, where 13 workers have reportedly been laid off, “Traffic lined up for more than a half mile at the Springdale entrance during Presidents' Day weekend because gate booths were understaffed,” Axios reported. 

The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment.