Here’s How Many Workers Each National Park Is Losing

Updated July 1, 2025 02:44PM

Alex Wild, 35, has been a park ranger for 15 years, working seasonal National Park Service positions for five of the last six years. Then, in 2024, Wild landed his dream job as an interpretive ranger at California’s Devil’s Postpile National Monument. He was still within the 12-month probationary period that all NPS workers undergo when they start a new position when the Trump Administration began slashing NPS jobs on February 14. Like thousands of other federal workers, Wild was told that afternoon that he’d been let go.

“I was the one who interacted with the park’s visitors, who handed out the badges for the Junior Ranger program, who coordinated visits from churches and other community groups,” Wild told Outside. He was also the park’s only EMT, and the first responder for emergencies, assisting in multiple incidents every week.

Like many cut NPS staffers, Wild went on social media to express his sadness. “My heart is broken for all of the other people who lost their jobs and their housing,” he wrote on Instagram. “My heart is broken for the parks and landscapes that will be damaged. And my heart is broken for my country.”

Wild is one of an estimated 5,000 employees working for public lands who have lost their jobs since February 14. About 1,000 of these were with the National Park Service—another 700 NPS employees reportedly took buyouts and went into early retirement. The rest were with the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

In the days since the massive layoffs, media outlets and the public have sought to understand how these cuts will impact specific National Parks. After all, the busy spring and summer travel seasons are on the horizon, and in just a few weeks millions of Americans will descend on America’s parklands and campgrounds for their vacations.

Most NPS site have yet to publish details on which jobs have been lost amid the culling, and the NPS’s national office has not distributed a list of fired employees. Outside reached out to the NPS national office to inquire about specific jobs that were terminated, but the agency didn’t respond. “The National Park Service is hiring seasonal workers to continue enhancing the visitor experience as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management. We are focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks,” read a statement released by the NPS on February 27.

Instead, the public has pieced together information via local news reports, national stories, and crowdsourced information. This lack of details has caused headaches with the non-profit groups that work with the NPS and other agencies to assist with trail projects and fundraising.

“There hasn’t been any transparency from the administration about the layoffs or deferred resignations. The public is in the dark,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of governmental affairs for the National Park Conservation Association. “Thankfully, many park rangers and staff who were laid off are speaking out and we are learning more about the positions lost. It should concern the public that maintenance technicians, wildlife biologists, interpreters, archeologists, ecologists who test water safety, fishery biologists, and EMTs were fired.”

Amid the lack of information, social media posts like the one Wild published have helped media outlets and the general public get a sense of just how sweeping and damaging the cuts have been to the agency. This month, a non-profit group called the Association of National Park Rangers (ANPR) has shared crowdsourced information about how many layoffs have occurred at each park. The information was compiled by a seasonal ranger who has asked to remain anonymous. The ranger has maintained a detailed spreadsheet with the number of jobs lost at all 433 NPS sites, including the 63 national parks.

Bill Wade, the executive director of the ANPR, called the list “unofficial,” but said that the information has come from reliable sources.

“These numbers come from existing employees at national parks, or from friends groups that know what is going on at the park,” he told Outside. Wade said that social media posts like the one Wild published have also helped his group tally the layoffs.

As of Friday, February 28, the group had charted 759 firings. Outside was able to view the spreadsheet, and see how the layoffs impacted each national park. According to the ANPR’s data, these are the number of employees lost at each park:

Other areas managed by the NPS have suffered major cuts as well, according to the ANPR data. Lake Mead National Recreation area in Arizona lost 13 staffers, including an aquatic ecologist who tests water safety. Gateway National Recreation Area in New York and New Jersey lost 11 staffers. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area lost 12, and Golden Gate National Recreation Area lost 10. The NPS’s Historic Preservation Training Center, a group that helps restore and maintain historic structures, let 34 people go.

The cuts have impacted a wide swath of jobs, from custodians and trail maintenance crews, to visitor center workers and fee collectors, as well as scientists and teachers. “We’ve been told that interpretive rangers and people who do education for kids and school groups were hit the hardest,” Wade said. “And people who are involved in collecting fees.”

Aubry Andreas, 29, was working as a visual information specialist at Rocky Mountain National Park when she became one of the park’s 12 probationary employees fired on February 14.

Andres oversaw all of the park’s printed materials, which in 2023 was the fifth-most visited NPS site with 4 million visitors. Among her tasks were creating the annual visitor’s guide, maintaining the official park map and the area maps that get handed out to visitors, and helping with park signage.

At the time of her termination, Aubry was leading an initiative to develop a new accessibility guide to Rocky Mountain, both for people with physical limitations as well as cognitive considerations. She was also redesigning the park’s junior ranger book using money from a grant.

“The crazy thing is, I’m the only Visual Information Specialist there,” Andreas told Outside. “Now that I’m gone, all that work will either have to get dropped—which obviously is going to impact visitors—or it’s going to get placed onto other people who already have their own full breadth of duties and responsibilities to carry out.”

A group of former and current NPS workers plan to hold protests at more than 100 sites managed by the agency. The group is calling itself “The Resistance Rangers.”

Other Agencies Feel the Cuts

Thousands of employees with other agencies overseeing public land have also lost their jobs throughout February. The New York Times estimates that the National Forest Service lost 3,400 positions. Throughout February, laid-off employees from these agencies have also posted about their plights online.

The day before she lost her job with the U.S. Forest Service, Arianna Knight, the Wilderness Trails Supervisor for the Yellowstone Ranger District in Montana, was working late. She traversed the backcountry adjacent to Yellowstone National Park by snowmobile, doing routine maintenance on one of her district’s ten public rental cabins. When Knight, 29, returned to the office, she received an ominous text from her boss. “There were whisperings of the terminations starting,” Knight told Outside.

At home that evening, Knight checked the /fednews page on Reddit and learned that probationary employees were going to be fired. Since stepping into a management role earlier in the year, she had been given that designation.

“I went into the office the next day knowing it was a lost cause,” Knight said.

Losing Knight will have a dramatic impact on the Yellowstone Ranger District. In 2024 her maintenance team—she managed between two and eight workers—cleared 4,062 trees that had fallen across trails near Yellowstone. Knight believes her ranger district won’t have the manpower in 2025 to do the same job. “There’s not enough support available from nonprofits and volunteers, and they’re not specialized enough to do the type of work that we do,” she said.

Nate Stickler, 25, who was a trails crew leader in Colorado’s San Juan National Forest, told Outside that he was two months away from finishing his probationary period when the cuts came down. The San Juan trails crew is comprised of seasonal workers, mostly novices, and volunteers. At the start of the season, it was Stickler’s job to train the crew, on everything from how to use a radio for communications in the backcountry to how to use a chainsaw.

“This is absolutely going to affect people’s experience of our public lands,” Stickler said. “I’m hoping that people will speak up and contact their congress person before the situation gets completely out of control.”

Wild contends that by opting to fire people on probationary status, the federal government will lose some of its best public land managers. “These are the people who’d just gotten promotions,” he said. “Or who’d performed so well in seasonal roles that they were offered permanent positions.”

Sam Oseroff, 34, is one. In 2024 he was hired by the Middle Fork Ranger District in Willamette National Forest as a seasonal employee. After several months, the NFS offered him a permanent job as a forestry technician, starting in January, 2025.

“It was bad timing,” Osteroff said. Doubly so because he’d just purchased a house—a decision he’d made after getting the offer for permanent work.

When Osteroff was let go, he was in the midst of replacing rotted beams on the roof of a shelter in one of the district’s campgrounds. He’s not sure who will take over the project, or how the rest of the maintenance that happens during winter is going to get finished. “There’s a hot springs, a couple dozen trailheads, and about 15 campgrounds,” he said. “And only two people left to take care of them.”

He’s also worried about the portion of the national forest closest to Eugene, Oregon, where unhoused people sometimes set up temporary camps, leaving behind garbage and human waste. “In the fall, we filled a pickup truck and 26-foot trailer full of gross stuff from a campsite we found along Salomon Creek,” he said.

Knight said what’s happening is a devastating loss. “Not only was my career taken from me in a way that can’t be replaced, but an entire industry is being dismantled,” she said.

Here’s How Many Employees Each National Park Is Losing

Other Agencies Feel the Cuts