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the layoffs and confusion, the Park Service now says it’s reinstating about 5, 000 seasonal jobs that were initially rescinded last month.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.”
Listen:
-
play_arrow
RMNP_Interview_2025-03-03 Gabrielle Mendoza
Transcript:
Jackie Sedley: 8:10 on listener-supported KGNU. I’m Jackie Sedley.
There was a protest this past Saturday outside of Rocky Mountain National Park, not too far from KGNU’s Boulder Studios. Hundreds showed up 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. One man told KGNU that the protest had grown four times in size from one a couple weeks ago.
Nearly every single person told KGNU that they are very worried for fire season, specifically. Those worries come from the layoff of at least a thousand federal workers that 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, first, this conversation will be co-hosted by myself, Jackie Sedley, and KGNU’s Greta Kerkhoff. Good morning, Greta.
Greta Kerkhoff: Good morning.
Sedley: Also joining us in the studio today is Gregor MacGregor, an assistant teaching professor at CU, who focuses on environmental law and policy. Morning, Gregor. Thank you for being here bright and early.
Gregor MacGregor: Thanks for having me on.
Sedley: And we’re also joined by Adam Auerbach, who worked as a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park during the busy season from 2016 to 2019. Good morning, Adam.
Adam Auerbach: Hey, good morning. So good to be here. Thank you.
Sedley: So, just starting off, I think it would be helpful if listeners understood a bit more about both of you and why you’re relevant to this conversation. Adam, starting with you, tell us about you and your history working for the National Parks and anything else that you want to add.
Auerbach: Yeah, gladly. So as you said, Jackie, I worked seasonally at Rocky Mountain National Park in what’s called an interpretation ranger. So folks who work really closely with the public, operating the visitor centers, answering, visitor questions, helping folks build safe and responsible itineraries, giving ranger programs to help connect people to the resources at the park.
And, you know, when lucky being out in the field to interface with the public and help ensure public safety and provide education, and then kind of other touch points that I think make me relevant to this conversation. I spent a few years, after my time working directly with the park service, with a nonprofit partner that works with all of our major federal public lands agencies to generate the next generation of public land stewards.
So we provided, internship and fellowship programs in consultation with federal public lands agencies, so got a lot of expertise mentoring people who were interested in becoming and often did become federal civil servants and thus learned a lot about, the federal hiring process, and worked really closely with, feds across agencies and have some other touch points, working in the nonprofit partner space really closely, with federal public lands agencies, and issues.
Sedley: Thank you for that. I have a lot of follow-up questions based on all that experience, but first I’ll allow Gregor to introduce himself as well.
MacGregor: Sure. Yeah, my name is Gregor MacGregor. It’s not a joke, but I won’t hold it against you if you laugh. I’m a teaching assistant professor at CU’s Masters of the Environment program, which is our professional environmental studies program meant to create sustainability leaders of the future.
I also teach our online outdoor recreation economy MS. So this is certainly near and dear to my heart and experience. I continue to be a lawyer, but I’ve worked on some cases dealing with public lands. And in a past life, I was an army officer who did work on lands management, for Fort Carson right here in the state.
Sedley: Okay, lots of ranging experience here. Greta, I know that you obviously don’t work in these industries, but I know that you’re an avid visitor of different parks and ski slopes, right?
Kerkhoff: Mm-hmm.
Sedley: Yeah, so we all have that experience of walking into a national park and feeling the beauty of it in the interaction with the wild, regardless of what stance you’re coming from.
You two obviously have the context and the more in-person experience. So I’d love to dive into that. First, just setting the scene here, either of you can answer this. Why do you think the federal government is motivated to shrink this workforce in particular? There’s speculation, there’s even some broader explanations, but why are the feds choosing these employees, this workforce, to shrink?
Auerbach: Yeah, I mean, I guess I can start, first of all, I don’t think it seems to be a concerted strategy to shrink this workforce in particular, right? I mean, I just heard your coverage just before we got on about what’s going on at NOAA just locally, right? And I mean, we’ve seen this with so many agencies, so it’s hard for me to conclude that this is a specific targeting, of the Park Service. I think something that’s also really important to mention is that it’s, it’s not just the Park Service, right? So a really significant importance, since we have mass firings across other federal public land agencies that are really critical to serving, the American public and particularly us here in Colorado.
For example, 3,400 layoffs at the U. S. Forest Service as well. Thousands with the Bureau of Land Management with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I know you mentioned Jackie particularly, concern around fire, and all of these agencies, have some role to play in keeping us safe from wildfire.
So I know I’m getting a little bit away from your question. But I think, particular targeting of the park service. I see, one pretty clear through line why that agency might be on the receiving end of like particular targeting, which is why we in the National Park Service, tell stories that I think are not highly compatible with the version of history that this agency is looking to peddle.
There was a recently signed executive order. I’ve got the name of it somewhere in my speaking notes if I can find it really quickly. Let’s see if I can. It doesn’t matter. It’s something about, radical indoctrination of K-12 education, but where they’re trying to further, you know, a particular version of American history that focuses only on the patriotic or the good, and ignores some of the more complicated but very real components of our American history that make up the tapestry of our country. I mean, we tell those stories in our national parks, right? We tell the stories around the enslavement of African Americans. We tell the stories around the quest for civil and human rights for so many marginalized communities throughout this country’s history and into the present.
We tell the stories of Japanese internment during WWII. We tell the stories across the West, but even here in Colorado of, you know, genocide of Native Americans and dispossession of indigenous land. So I think that is a reason why the Park Service might be particularly, impacted or targeted, but I think, you know, my impression certainly is that we are not in this moment seeing the Park Service targeted any more than any of those other agencies.
The Forest Service losing 3,400 people, that’s about 10 percent of the staff of that agency. That’s actually more percentage-wise than the Park Service lost, for example.
Kerkhoff: It’s interesting that you bring up how public land is also so intertwined with the teaching of history in this country.
I’d love to hear more about that, but Gregor, first, I’d like to hear sort of your interpretation of some of the motives behind the layoffs.
MacGregor: Yeah, I think at a more meta level, you’ve got a very anti-government government right now. You know, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has called bureaucracy a constitutional existential threat.
So this particular cut to the NPS seems to just be part of the broader push to make good on campaign promises, to shrink the federal government. Some of the memos that were sent out by OPM to the agencies, there was a journalist who found metadata in there showing that Project 2025 authors had actually authored those memos and then passed them through, essentially, OPM to the agencies.
So, I would say that a big part of this is just part of the general anti-government agenda and, you know, possibly to sew a level of, dissatisfaction with how the government works so that, we can end up with privatization of services or the transfer of public lands either to private entities or to states that are unfriendly to federal public lands.
Sedley: Adam, I wanted to turn back to you. You mentioned the stories that you would tell, individuals that came through the parks, the different education and experiences you had with them. Paint a bit of a picture for listeners of what your time in the parks was like. What did you do? What did you see? Any natural experiences that you still have wonder over?
Auerbach: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, living and working in the park is such a privilege. I feel so honored to have that, have had that experience, you know, in my first season I worked in, or I lived in the Llama House in Park Housing, which is called as such because your, taxpayer dollars support hardworking, llama employees at the park.
I don’t think they’ve been targeted by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, but who knows? Yeah. So, you know, just living in the park was really special. Had an elk on my front porch once upon a time. But yeah, you know, really, really special to work with people from across the country and world.
You know, people of all political persuasions, I think it’s really important to say, you know, this is not a partisan issue. Functionally, the Colorado College puts out a State of the Rockies Project survey annually and recently the 2025 version came out, and it, you know, shows really, you know, massive support for public lands and adequately funding and staffing them across the partisan spectrum.
So it’s Democrats and Republicans alike. You know, there’s absolutely no mandate, to be clear for, diminishing the staff and the funding for these parks or reducing access, or as Gregor was saying, conveying them to the states or to private interests. But I’m getting away from the question, which was like, what was it like to work for the park?
Yeah, really beautiful, but also really hard. You know, you make very low wages. It’s seasonal work. You lose your job, you lose your health insurance over the off-season. Which, this is part of why my heart goes out so deeply to so many of my former colleagues who went through many years of that lifestyle of such instability.
So little kind of financial stability as well. And you finally get your foot in the door. To become a permanent employee, and you’re in that probationary period, which again, I think this was covered just before we came online, but the probationary period does not mean that you screwed up, or you’re on thin ice, or you’re a poor performer.
Everyone is a probationary employee when they first come on as a permanent staff, or when they come on as someone who was recently promoted. So, you know, I have a friend, you know, a lot of folks who are really wary to have their stories told right now, and understandably so, because they are legitimately under attack, so it’s not paranoia when you’re legitimately under threat.
But I do have a friend, who was fired recently from the Forest Service, who did offer that I share her story, and she worked 10 years seasonally before getting her permanent job. So, you know, this first moment in her life to have year-round financial stability, year-round health insurance, year-round work, still making really low wages doing, you know, backbreaking labor, you know, building and maintaining trails in the wilderness in the Forest Service Ranger District.
But again, to my experience in the park, yeah, really beautiful to get to help the public come to know such a special place that’s part of this over 100-year history of this kind of shared national heritage and to work with people across difference across the political spectrum and, you know, introduce them to this beautiful places is really magical.
And I think if we want to go really meta, that’s kind of another part of why parks are actually a threat to what the current administration stands for is I have seen how the types of experiences that people have in parks, in fact, experiences that I personally facilitated can generate in people a suite of values that are actually antithetical and dangerous to what this administration is trying to do.
Right. So you come to the park and you experience, let’s say a fall day. It’s the Elk rut, the Elke are bugling, the fall aspen are in color. You come, you know, it’s a beautiful blue sky day. Let’s say there’s this Christmas in the air and you look around. Maybe you’re at my ranger program and you’re surrounded by people who look differently than you.
You have people speaking different languages from all over the country and world. And you have this shared experience that grows in people and environmental ethics and a sense of stewardship and helps people come into communion and empathy for each other and for the natural world. These are the types of people who are going to have had the experiences that might make them think environmentally consciously, and care about their neighbors across difference and that’s dangerous to the current administration’s priorities
Sedley: Did you say that your friend was laid off after 10 years or that she just got permanent status?
Auerbach: So she had done 10 years of seasonal work, including like Conservation Core work, which is my background. I’ve done wildfire kind of mitigation work through the AmeriCorps Conservation Corps model. That’s a really typical first step into federal public lands management.
So I think in the case of this friend, she did that for a number of years and then, then seasonally, directly with the U.S. Forest Service and then only recently getting that permanent job, but in the probationary period and thus fired.
Sedley: She was. Okay. And one last question for you, Adam. We have so much to cover, but thankfully we’ll be covering this well through nine o’clock when you were a ranger that was pre this iteration of Trump. That was Trump’s first administration. Did you face any threats of a similar nature back then? And Gregor, you can also chime in on the comparison between the threats happening this time around compared to the threats under the Trump administration toward the parks the first time.
Auerbach: Yeah, I mean, I think it is really different. I think to Gregor’s earlier point, the posturing that federal civil servants are the enemy is really different this time. I think there was a certain amount of, you know, some of the same attitudes, but kind of curtailed with some fundamental sense of respect for the humanness of these people and for their expertise.
And I think, yeah, there was a hiring freeze under Trump 1.0, but not, there was none of this only very arguably legal mass firing of probationary employees, which, I’ll let Gregor take the legality or lack thereof of that issue but I think it did feel really different, you know, you have like active intimidation, from the Department of Government of Efficiency as far as requiring federal employees to send five things they did last week, weekly now, like workforce hostility like that.
And I think it seems like during the first Trump administration, we didn’t have quite as much recklessness with it. Right. I mean, I’m. deeply concerned for fire season, and I hope we’ll have the chance to get into some specific questions as to the reasons for that because I can speak at length at that.
But I’m also deeply concerned for the beginning of the park season with the loss of the institutional knowledge of all these recently fired permanent people, and then the delays to seasonal hiring, right? So, I mean, the parks run on seasonal staff. I was a part of that infrastructure, and we didn’t have quite the same magnitude, of time delay for the onboarding of seasonals.
So, I mean, folks will in all likelihood, not be on the ground in adequate force for the start of the busy season. So I’m really worried about public safety. I’m worried about resource impacts. And I’m worried about the quality of the visitor experience folks are going to have, particularly during the first half of the season.
So it does really feel different to me. And I think also, yeah, just the momentum around privatizing our public lands as well.
Sedley: And we’re turning to Gregor MacGregor, an assistant teaching professor at CU who focuses on environmental law and policy.
Gregor, morning again. And let’s continue that conversation, Gregor, looking at the comparison between the first administration and the second.
MacGregor: Yeah, I think with the first administration, it was very much mediated by many more establishment Republicans. You probably remember the term, the adults in the room, and the first Trump administration was far less organized around these anti-government principles.
I think partly because the kinds of anti-government folks like the authors of Project 2025, the quote-unquote MAGA Republicans, the Federalist Society, hadn’t had the time to really influence the president’s views or to create the superstructure that would allow something like the quickness of action that we’re seeing in this administration.
If you remember, the first administration was a lot of half-steps. There seemed to be a much greater willingness to accept orders from the courts, in order to roll back, unlawful actions. And this administration came in obviously with the influence of Project 2025, you had a much larger built-out nominee list for key positions that hold these kinds of views that would take these actions and ultimately it looks like there’s a far greater reluctance to accept orders of the court when it comes to these actions.
Kerkhoff: And you mentioned in this administration, MAGA Republicans have a much broader scope of power this time around. So, what’s the legality of all of this? How are they accomplishing this? Can they realistically move forward the way that they are? What does that look like?
MacGregor: Yeah, so it’s good to keep in mind, right, the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, serves as central HR for the federal government, right?
This is the tie between the agency’s OPM and the ability to set personnel goals, changes, policies. That being said, as Adam pointed out, probationary status isn’t just you’re new or you’re in trouble. It is also used for any time you lateral, or you change agencies, or you get promoted. So quite a few probationary staff have actually been in their agencies for five years, 10 years, 15 years, right?
And they’re moving up the ladder. They’ve got a lot of experience and in most cases, right, they have exemplary or good track records. They wouldn’t be, still in service if that wasn’t the case. And this brings us to the illegality of what’s happening. Probationary employees don’t have the same level of protection, as when they are off probationary status, but they’re still not at-will employees. You can’t just let them go. Letting them go requires that they not perform in their new role, whatever the reason for that new role is, which is why we’re seeing this happen in the way that it is because the way to lay off a large number of people is to take something like probationary status and just put down a blanket of, well, you’re not meeting the expectations.
OPM sent a form letter, right, with fill in the name, fill in the date, you are not meeting expectations, send this out to all of your probationary employees, and it’s simply impossible that the agencies, much less OPM, could review thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of personnel files in order to make the determination that these probationary employees we’re in fact, not up to snuff. And that was the ruling of a district court judge last week out of the Northern District of California, that there is no plausible legal basis for these mass firings based on performance of these employees. And that if the federal government wants to do a mass downsizing, it has to do what’s called a reduction in force, which takes much longer, has much stricter guidelines, and that what’s happening right now is not indeed legal and has been enjoined.
Sedley: Adam turning back to you. You mentioned that you’ve done work mentoring individuals that were working to enter the Federal Service as employees. You’re also looking for. jobs against thousands of recently fired federal employees that are also trying to find jobs at state, local, and nonprofit levels that, as you’ve mentioned, rely heavily often on federal dollars.
So talk a bit about that landscape. I know that’s a big question to tackle, but what does that look like and feel like right now?
Auerbach: Yeah, I mean, it’s really hard. So even under under quote good times, right? So I worked for several years with a nonprofit developing in really close consultation with federal public lands agencies, you know, pathways into federal service and land management.
And we were recruiting these really dedicated, bright young people into these kind of seasonal internships and fellowships. And even under the Biden administration, there was not often a good permanent, sometimes even seasonal job for these people coming out of their internships and fellowships because it’s so competitive to get into federal service.
So I mean in this landscape, yeah, I mean my heart is really breaking for young people who want to do this stewardship work. And I’m one of those people, I didn’t mention in my introduction but, I know Gregor really well, because I’m actually in the graduate program that he teaches out of, and I’ll be graduating in May and I’m on the job market.
And I was actually really excited to return to federal service myself. A recent executive order dismantled the presidential management fellowship program, which has existed since 1977 to recruit high-performing graduate students, not to toot my own horn, but, you know, into leadership within the federal service and I had gone through multiple rounds of really intensive interviews and assessments to be considered for that program and that was totally scrapped, which I think is a threat, not only to the present but to the future of the very existence of a nonpartisan and professional civil service.
I think all that we’ve been discussing is a threat to that. But yeah, really bleak job outcomes for the next generation of stewardship. professionals, right? The federal government is the largest employer, in this field. And then we have now young people like myself needing to compete with thousands of highly qualified folks who are fired out of federal government positions.
I’ve also applied for positions with nonprofits that work really closely with federal public lands agencies to get critical work done on the ground and those agencies or organizations are really highly impacted as well because they rely on federal dollars. Right? So one position I applied for, they basically got back to me and said, Hey, we’re not filling this for the foreseeable future because of the chaos that’s coming from our federal partners right now.
And another one may or may not fill it. Right? So those are just a couple examples. And I think just the sense of fear in young people who have expertise similar to what I have is really high, within the ecosystem of undergraduate and graduate students at CU, for example. But also just people in my network who have developed these experiences over the years, these internships, these seasonal positions, these permanent positions.
It’s like overnight has that experience become like totally useless? I don’t know, I hope not. But I really fear that you know, I have to hope for my own sanity that it isn’t after all this, but that we’re going to have lost a generation of people that can fill the positions even if there is an increase of hiring in the future.
Sedley: And I did want to quickly clarify to your point earlier, Adam, that these layoffs affect both National Park Service employees and U.S. Forest Service employees.
Auerbach: Yeah, and Fish and Wildlife and Bureau of Land Management and tons of other agencies as well.
Sedley: Right, we don’t want to overly broaden the scope to show just how many departments and individuals are being impacted.
Kerkhoff: I want to ask you, Adam, and also Gregor, maybe I’ll start with you, Adam. You mentioned just sort of how many people with, years and years of institutional knowledge that the Park Service is going to be losing. How do you see that going forward affecting the new summer hires that are coming in, needing to be trained and just going forward?
Auerbach: Yeah, I mean, it’s really bleak, right? I mean, I think a lot of the permanent people who are fired, the probationary folks, were going to be supervising the seasonal people, right? So there’s this ripple effect. And the thing that’s really unique about how this was done was there was no foresight or thought to consequences, right?
It happened so fast. So, I mean, you talk about, right, this was all being done in the name of efficiency. It’s not efficient to fire your lowest-paid probationary staff who have just come into their first seasonal or excuse me, first permanent position who do some of the most critical on-the-ground work.
And the other category of probational folks like Gregor was saying are the people who are high performers who were recently promoted. They say they want to run the government like a business. You would never do that in a business. But anyways, the question was specifically, sorry, repeat.
Kerkhoff: How do you see it affecting the Park Service with all of these people who have this knowledge of how to train the new employees, how to care for the summer season, not being there?
Auerbach: Yeah, I mean, I think I’m really concerned about resource impacts. And the other thing that I think we’ve seen is just like, there are some positions that are really critical, and there might only be one person who’s doing that job, and if that person happened to be probationary, that park or that forest or that refuge is out of luck, right?
So I’m seeing stories about like the one plumber, right? Or the one wastewater treatment person or the one dispatcher. These are really critical public safety positions and that is not an efficient use of our taxpayer dollars to get rid of that person. And I do also want to make sure we talk about fire a little bit, speaking of, something that’s not efficient.
Prevention costs way less than fighting a wildfire, and obviously there are significant challenges also just with human wellness and suffering if there actually is a wildfire. It costs something like, you know, on average, $1,500 or $2,000 to do wildfire mitigation fuels reduction work.
I’ve done that work really difficult work. I promise we’re not paying the people who do that work enough. It costs about $50,000 an acre to fight a wildfire if it happens. So, it’s really not efficient to be cutting the people who do that work.
And I think something that’s also really important to note on fires, there’s been this like messaging from the administration that we’re not cutting, wildfire fighters, and we’re not cutting, law enforcement or public safety. That really misses something that’s fundamental about how these agencies work, is that people wear lots of hats, right? So the person who might be responsible for recreation permits, for example, if there’s an emergency, if there’s a fire, that person might have their red card. And they are in all likelihood going to get redeployed to handle and support that emergency. Or even if they’re not red-carded and they’re going to be on the ground fighting fire, you know, there are a lot of parts of the mechanism for fighting and protecting us from fire that are not literal firefighting positions, right?
You have administrative support, you have logistical support, you have working with, public information messaging, there’s a whole suite of positions. So I’m really concerned for this coming fire season. The Forest Service has not, like the Park Service, been exempted from bringing on seasonal staff.
They were in a seasonal hiring moratorium regardless, but that was meant to accept firefighters, so they’re not able to bring on firefighters. So, things are looking really scary right now, especially in an urban-wildland interface like we live in here, in the Front Range of Colorado, as to the government’s ability to effectively keep us all safe from fire.
Sedley: Gregor, I wanted to ask one question unless you had something that you wanted to add to that. Looking at the outdoor recreation side of things before we move into the next steps moving forward and what either of you or your colleagues are doing to maybe push back or build back up. Is there a chance that the parks will have less capacity per day? Or that visitors will have even more barriers to entry? I know sometimes park passes get purchased really quickly in the busy season, but will that look even more strained?
MacGregor: Yeah, we’ve already seen a number of parks make announcements to the changes for the summer season and often starting immediately. Carlsbad Caverns has announced that they won’t be doing guided tours anymore and that they’ll be ending self-guided tours at the end of March.
You’ve got Yosemite, basically closing out 577 camping spots. Florissant has reduced the number of days that its visitor centers will be open. Many of the parks have actually announced that some number of visitor centers, sometimes the only one, will be closed because the people who normally do the education, the, you know, junior ranger programs, out of those visitor centers are needed to do things like manage traffic or man the gates.
Even right now at Grand Canyon National Park, the cuts have really deeply affected people who normally let people simply in and out of the park, which has led to extremely long lines. So we are already seeing the impacts to recreation.
Sedley: And if you’re just now joining us, you’re listening to a conversation about the mass layoffs impacting forest workers, parks workers, and many departments within the industry and the overall impacts that that has on our national parks and public lands. I’m Jackie Sedley, joined in studio by KGNU’s Greta Kerkhoff, Gregor MacGregor, an assistant teaching professor at CU focusing on environmental law and policy, and Adam Auerbach who worked as a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park during the busy season from 2016 to 2019.
With just about 13 minutes left here, I wanted to move toward looking forward. We’ve reflected on the history of these parks in some ways and of the administration and the initial responses right now by Adam, your former colleagues.
Now, these firings took place within the first handful of weeks of Trump’s presidency. So either of you, what do you anticipate or fear for the next four years related to the outdoor rec and land management sector, natural resources, and public lands?
Auerbach: Yeah, I mean, I think something we haven’t touched on that is really critical to consider here is how our Colorado economy and frankly, across the country will be impacted by this.
So, outdoor recreation economy is huge here in the state of Colorado, across the west, and across, a lot of rural communities and other parts of the country as well. So, outdoor recreation economy $1.2 trillion. That’s trillion with a T in economic impacts for our country. 3.1 percent of employment, 2.3 percent of GDP.
Every job I’ve ever had personally and you know, what is the backbone of our outdoor recreation economy? It’s access to public lands. I used to live in the community of Estes Park. And almost every person who’s not retired in that community, their economic livelihood and their ability to pay bills is to do with the influence of Rocky Mountain National Park and the tourism that that park and its surrounding public lands brings to the region.
Rocky specifically supports about 4,300 jobs. That’s much, much deeper than the number of people actually literally employed by the park, and brings 464 million annually into our region. This is, this is really significant. I think too early to tell whether we’re going to see less people visiting our parks due to all this, but obviously, and rightly so, you know, this has been in the news so that the public is aware. And if even 10 percent of people, you know, decide they’re not going to come to some of these parks and forests that will really hurt our rural communities that are gateway communities. And, you know, a lot of these federal jobs in some communities, you know, for example, with the Forest Service and a lot of remote areas, you know, these are some of the only good stable year-round jobs in these communities and they’re really a backbone.
So that’s an impact I’m really worried about is just, you know, people’s ability to, to support their families and livelihoods and the ripple effect that will come from all this. We’ve talked about fire, so really deeply concerned about that. I mean, I think one of the things that’s interesting about fire is, is how easy it might end up being for the public to miss the impacts of what’s happening, right?
So you have fire, you could have a really catastrophic fire season, and we’ll never know which of those human consequences if there’s a loss to life or property could have been avoided with effective fuel breaks and effective mitigation beforehand. And, you know, so for potentially generations to come, like, we’ll never be able to pinpoint, oh, like, this person who lost their life, this person who lost their home, this community that was lost, like, would it have not been lost in a, you know, counterfactual universe in which we could do proper fuels mitigation?
I’m just concerned that we’ll you know, not see the human dimensions of things that we will, as a society, see as natural disasters. But, you know, the reality is that a lot of these actually can be prevented through adequate foresight and proper management done by experts.
I’ll pass it over to Gregor shortly, but I think, yeah, just resource impacts, you know, like the park service. We are 20 percent staff less than in 2010 in the face of 40 million more visitors in that time. So we were already really hurting. I can tell you that from, you know, personal experience, the number of hats we were all needing to wear, and there’s really no other outcome other than, impacts to the resources in the Park Service by mission is required to not only provide public enjoyment today, but also to protect for kind of in perpetuity into the future. And I think our ability to carry out that mission is really deeply compromised.
Kerkhoff: Gregor, anything to add?
MacGregor: Yeah, I’ll say that if we zoom out a bit, even if we do see a return after four years of some of these personnel, or even if some of these personnel are reinstated and are in a position to resume their former jobs, most of our public lands, including the NPS, have a backlog of things like routine maintenance, but also on the planning side are backed up for things like wildlife management plans, visitation plans, new proposals for outdoor recreation, whether that be a United States Forest Service allowing an expansion of a ski area or a management plan for recreation in a National Monument or a National Park. When we see this kind of lack of discrimination in how you go about a reduction in force, right, I don’t believe that there is any discrimination here, not in the sense of, you know what I mean? So when you see this, 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. 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, even from 2010 levels and we’re going to see that compounded into the future.
Kerkhoff: Going forward, besides a federal judge, can local and state governments do anything to protect rangers from being fired? And are you anticipating more layoffs in this sector going forward?
MacGregor: I wouldn’t say that your local and state government necessarily have a way to protect the federal employees.
Now, certainly, they can lobby the federal government on behalf of those employees and on behalf of those public lands, because they are so intertwined and important to local economies. But I would say this ties into the need for all of us, including state and local reps to put pressure on the federal government, to put pressure on your representatives, and to do things like host mass protests because we’ve seen that at least in some areas with enough pushback there is an appetite to perhaps change positions. You know, we’ve seen this with Ukraine, where the Speaker of the House has come out and directly contradicted the President on his position on Ukraine. And I believe that there is still the opportunity to exert influence over the government in this space, and hopefully not to conduct a reduction in force or another mechanism by which we make even deeper cuts.
Sedley: We have just about five minutes left here in this conversation, and I think a good point to talk about as we end today’s show are any efforts that people are taking to push back. I know that we heard that protest audio from the large protest outside Rocky Mountain National Park over the weekend that took place at hundreds of parks across the country as well.
So, I’m wondering if either of you are involved with or willing to speak on any efforts you know of that are either pushing back or continuing to bolster stewardship and the job force for this sector, and also what people listening can do to support those that have lost their jobs.
Auerbach: Yeah, I mean, I will say I have been so proud of my former colleagues and folks in public management for using our voices in many cases, there is a very real risk associated with with doing so in the political environment that we live in. But people have been sharing their stories on social media in the media. I published something in National Parks Traveler, I’ve attended both of the protests proudly in support of my former colleagues that were mentioned at Rocky Mountain National Park, and so many of my former colleagues are doing the same, speaking with the media, speaking with friends and family.
So I think, you know, this issue in particular, I see a really significant utility in elevating this issue because I think it’s really different than a lot of what’s happening right now across our federal government that is partisan, public lands are not partisan. I mean, the data does not support the idea that this is a left or right blue or red issue.
I think, it’s really important to keep this issue out in front of the public because there actually is an opportunity for us to come together, I think, uniquely around mobilizing support for our public lands. And frankly, we’re going to need to, you know, there is a really real movement around privatizing our public lands and that is dangerous.
I want to make sure I leave some time, for Gregor as well, but you know, I think as far as things people can do, just continuing to spread the awareness, talking to people in your network across the political spectrum, because I think there is a resonance of this message that will get to people.
I think also, you know Gregor spoke a little bit to Russell Vought of the Office of Management and Budget, and his efforts, you know, he’s quoted as saying, he wants to traumatize the federal civil servants, and we all have a responsibility in helping to push back against that. So when you do visit your parks when you do visit your forest, you got to be really kind to these people, and when inevitably the bathrooms are overflowing, and there’s trash where there shouldn’t be, and things are closed certain days of the week, and you can’t attend that ranger program, or get your kids sworn in as a junior ranger. It’s not their fault. And 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.
MacGregor: I’ll walk back something I said, there is the potential for states, right, to sue and intercede on some of these issues. So in addition to putting political pressure on your federal representatives, definitely also put pressure onto your state representatives, because we’ve seen for good and for bad, the states get involved in litigation with the federal government over these kinds of decisions. I think adding onto, Adam’s call for kindness that also extends to your state and local public lands, and recreation. Because I expect that as we see limits placed on national parks units, national forest units, wherever the case may be, you’ll probably have more people than going to your state parks, state forests, that may also not be equipped to take those 40 million extra visitors. So also being kind to them and also working with your local and state governments to take care of those public lands as well.
Sedley: All right. Well, that brings us to the end of our show. Once again, Gregor MacGregor, an assistant teaching professor at CU, focusing on environmental law and policy, and Adam Auerbach, a former ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park. Thank you both so much for joining us. We appreciate you and all of the contributions that you’ve made.
MacGregor: Thank you.
Auerbach: Yeah. Thank you so much. Really appreciate the opportunity to chat.
