Susan Ford, Horace Albright's granddaughter who worked as a seasonal ranger in the 1980s, was incensed that her daughter was among the National Park Service employees fired on Valentine's Day/NPS archives

A great-granddaugther of Horace Albright, a National Park Service icon who guided the birth of the agency, was caught up in the Park Service's indiscriminate termination of 1,000 on Valentine's Day.

Susan Isaacson, Albright's granddaughter, said Sunday that her daughter was fired from her position in the Park Service.

"My daughter is not 'waste and fraud.'  But she was just fired from her National Park Service job on Friday, February 14, Valentine’s Day, ironically, by email, in a heartless and untrue statement that she failed to meet the requirements of the position. Everyone fired got the same message," Isaacson wrote in an open letter to "those Americans who care about each other." "Of course this isn’t true. She has only been in the job for two months. Her only failure was having faith in our democracy and the rule of law and legal personnel procedures."

"Her great-grandfather wrote the legislation, and when passed, carried, by hand, that famous bill, establishing our National Park System, to President Woodrow Wilson to be signed into law," wrote Susan Isaacson.

While Stephen Mather was the first director of the National Park Service, Albright worked hard in his shadow, and was out front carrying the effort to create the agency and during its early years when Mather was struggling with deep bouts of depression. When Mather was hospitalized by depression, Albright served as acting director and organized the fledgling Park Service, crafted its policies and procedures, lobbied Congress for appropriations, and "wrote the so-called 'creed' for the National Park Service which appeared as a letter from Secretary Lane to Mather," according to Park Service history.

That letter laid out three main principles that Lane said the new agency must  follow:

• First that the national parks must be maintained in absolutely unimpaired form for the use of Future generations as well as those of our own time;
• second, that they are set apart for the use, observation, health, and pleasure of the people;
• and third, that the national interest must dictate all decisions affecting public or private enterprise in the parks.

In her letter Susan Isaacson, who worked as a seasonal ranger herself during the 1980s, said President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were "carrying out a coup right before our eyes and under our noses."

"The Republicans in Congress who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America and are now ignoring and breaking that oath, standing by watching, no, enabling the fall of our democracy," she added. 

"So now it is February 15 and tens of thousands of dedicated, hard-working, now unemployed federal workers, including my daughter, are wondering what comes next?  Where do they go? How do they feed their families? How do they find a new job?," she said in closing her letter.

"Upending families, communities, lives. Now that’s waste and fraud."