National parks cutting hours, services amid federal layoffs

Related video: Why some national parks charge entrance fees

(NewsNation) — National parks across the U.S. face service reductions and staffing shortages due to federal budget cuts, affecting more than 1,000 employees and potentially millions of visitors.

According to the National Parks Conservation Association, about 400 people took the federal buyout, and about 1,000 more were laid off.

Despite a hiring freeze, the Department of the Interior reinstated 5,000 seasonal employees last week, and now they're signing off on more than 2,000 more.

"The Park Service has been given clearance to hire as many as 7,700 seasonal staff, which is a good number, but definitely not a replacement for those permanent staff that have been lost, that provide the expertise to manage those seasonals and operate parks and protect resources," John Garder, a representative for the National Parks Conservation Association Government, told NewsNation.

"People should be prepared to lower their standards, because they may very well see things like long lines on the way into the park, dirty bathrooms, or even some closed bathrooms or visitor centers," he added.

The Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado announced on Facebook that it would be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays due to a lack of staffing.

At Yosemite National Park, photographer Brittany Colt captured the American flag being hung upside down on the famous El Capitan rock formation. An upside-down flag is a sign of distress.

"I realized that there was about six climbers up there rigging an American flag upside down right next to the firefall," Colt told NewsNation.

Yosemite recently announced many of its campgrounds would be unavailable for several weeks across June and July, the peak season for one of the most visited NPS sites. Zion National Park is already feeling the impacts of limited staffing. The park — which has been understaffed for years, according to local authorities — could spiral into “chaos” without enough rangers, the mayor of Springdale, located just outside the park’s south entrance, told local outlet KSTU.

“We need adequate staff,” Phil Francis, the executive director for the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, told Nexstar earlier this month. “We don’t have that. It’s going to be a really difficult year to provide the kind of service and protection that we need.”

According to the National Park Service, more than 325 million people visited national parks in 2023, up 13 million from the previous year.

Those visitors spent roughly $26.4 billion in the gateway communities around the national parks, data from NPS shows. That, in turn, supported 415,000 thousand jobs along with "$19.4 billion in labor income, $32.0 billion in value added, and $55.6 billion in economic output in the national economy," the agency said last year.

Almost two dozen national parks broke visitation records in 2023, NPS data shows. Since the pandemic, visitors have experienced long wait times and crowds, leading many sites to enact reservation systems, permits, and timed entry processes.

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