National park visitors could be confronted by "chaos" this summer if the Trump administration does not lift its hold on season hirings — soon —, says former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis.

"It will be chaos. There will be a lot of dirty toilets and a lot of visitors unsatisfied with their experience, and hopefully not too much damage to the resource," Jarvis told the Traveler during a phone call Thursday. "But if you don't have folks on the ground out there, we certainly saw this during the last shutdown [in 2018-19] when they didn't staff the parks, and we saw vandalism, intentional damage."

The ramifications could affect a suite of crucial operations in the parks, everything from plumbing and electrical work in park buildings to critical water testing, snowplowing roads and sanitation treatment, he said.

The National Park Service, like many other federal agencies, has been traumatized by the administration's hiring freeze and "deferred resignation" offer, under which Trump is trying to get federal employees to quit, by promising them pay through September.

The agency already was struggling on a daily basis due to underfunding and lack of personnel prior to the Republican's second term. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, staffing to operate national parks is down 20 percent, or nearly 3,500 full-time jobs, since 2010. 

As of Thursday, an estimated 40,000 federal workers had taken Trump's offer, according to published reports. It's unclear which agencies they worked for. While the offer was to expire Thursday evening, a federal judge stayed that until Monday to give federal employees more time to review and consider the offer.

"Everybody's totally stressed out right now," one Park Service employee told the Traveler, asking not to be identified so as not to jeopardize their job.

The communications to federal workers that offered the resignation incentive came not from the Park Service but from the Office of Personnel Management and drove home the point that jobs are not secure, the employee said. On Thursday morning, though, the Park Service sent out a version of the "agreement ... tailored for NPS employees."

"It's a new world now. No opinions and no light-heartedness [on the job]. If anything, work is going to be less efficient now," the employee said.

President Trump also has moved to convert some federal employees with civil service protections to at-will employees who could be fired without cause. Last week that reclassification was challenged in federal court.

Crucial Seasonal Employees

Each year the Park Service hires somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 workers for the busy summer season, but last month the Office of Personnel Management rescinded all those job offers. As a result, if the hiring freeze is lifted, all those jobs likely would need to be re-advertised, and the applicants would have to reapply, further delaying hiring. There also are a good number of permanent positions, reaching into the ranks of superintendents, that won't be filled unless the freeze is lifted, either across the board or for specific positions.

As the Traveler reported Wednesday, the administration also has canceled law enforcement training through the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) for Park Service rangers hired after January 27. While the class wasn't expected to include more than two dozen rangers from across federal land management agencies, the Park Service's ranks of both full-time and seasonal law-enforcement [LE] rangers are seriously low, so any added LEs coming out of that FLETC training would help improve safety in the park system for visitors.

The Trump administration intends to resort to layoffs or firings to reduce the workforce if not enough workers take the resignation offer. A notice sent Thursday from the Office of Personnel Management to all federal agencies and departments asked that any barriers that might prevent the agency from "swiftly" firing "poor performing employees who cannot or will not improve" be identified. The memo [attached below] further instructed agency and department heads to report by March 7 "all employees who received less than a 'fully successful' performance rating in the past three years."

Mass layoffs within the Park System could be crippling, Jarvis and others believe. "There are serious consequences to all that are just going to play out, particularly as they go into summer operations," he said.

Communications staff at the Interior Department and National Park Service did not respond to inquiries concerning the hiring situation.

Key Operations At Stake

Jarvis speaks authoritatively on Park Service operations and needs following a Park Service career that goes much deeper than his stint as the agency's director and dates to 1976, when he worked as a seasonal interpretive ranger at the National Mall. His career saw him serve as superintendent of two national parks, Mount Rainier and Wrangell-St. Elias, as well as of Craters of the Moon National Monument. Along the way he served stints as a protection ranger, a resource management specialist, park biologist, and chief of natural and cultural resources through Prince William Forest Park in Virginia, Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and North Cascades National Park. 

That background and experience in the parks has Jarvis concerned about how they might function with less-than-necessary staffing. Seasonal workers, he noted, staff visitor centers, collect fees, clean restrooms, lead interpretive talks, and handle backcountry trail work. Search-and-rescue crews, wildland firefighters, and emergency medical service positions also rely on seasonal workers, said Jarvis.

Just as vital to parks, if not more so, are full-time employees who might be tempted to take the administration up on its offer to quit now, he said. Throughout the Park Service there are "highly skilled plumbers, electricians, water-treatment plant operators, heavy equipment operators," said Jarvis, and if they accept the offer it could jeopardize daily operations in the parks.

"They are essential to a park functioning," Jarvis went on, noting the need for daily water quality testing, wastewater treatment plant operations, and, in the case of Glacier National Park in Montana, snowplow operators to get the Going-to-the-Sun Road open for summer.

Worse, if a park loses those valuable positions, the administration's scheme would require them to continue paying employees for months after they left the job, meaning money out the door for not getting work done. The hiring freeze also could prevent parks from replacing those workers.

"They're really going to be in a Catch 22," said Jarvis. "What do they do? How do they provide the basic services? ... If parks lose those core positions as a result of this probably illegal resignation system, parks are really, on top of not having any seasonals, will have some really challenging operations this summer."

Left With No Choice

Park superintendents could be forced into making indiscriminate personnel decisions. For example, to keep water systems functioning they could try to get by with one less interpreter or law-enforcement ranger.

During an interview Thursday, Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, and John Garder, the organization’s senior director for budget and appropriations, said there were many unknowns concerning how the Park Service will react to the administration’s requests to downsize federal government.

While there have been no apparent internal discussions at the Park Service to strategically cut away at operations for budget savings, according to Brengel, Garder said the agency might find itself with no choice but to close some small parks with few staff.

"You've got eight [full-time employees]. Well, as it turns out, three or four of them are on their probationary period [and so subject to firing] because people retired at the same time," Garder said, drawing a hypothetical. "You had a couple of new ones coming in, and that's not happening now [because of the hiring freeze]. And then you had two people accept the buyout offer, and you're left with one or two FTEs. You're going to close the park. You can't operate a park."

"You're going to have to shut the doors," added Brengel.

Jarvis said the clock was ticking with the typically busy summer season not too many months off. 

"At some point the public has to say this is unacceptable, because Congress is incapable of doing that at the moment," he said. "There's sort of the great hope that [Interior] Secretary [Doug] Burgum might step in and say, 'Wait a minute. We want to avoid a disaster this summer in terms of the tourist economy and gateway communities and the businesses that rely on this. If they wait to the last minute, then they're not going to be able to fix it."

Additional reporting for this story was done by Lori Sonken.