President Trump’s zest for rapidly shrinking the government is triggering anxiety about conservation priorities that have been embedded for more than five decades in the country’s national parks and wildlife refuges. Amid the staffing whiplash — chaotic firings and reinstatement of rangers, scientists, and other civil servants — America’s most vulnerable plant and animal species face new peril in their struggle to survive.  

Even as fired workers are being offered reinstatement under federal court orders, the White House is asking the Supreme Court to halt the rehiring orders for 1,000 National Park Service employees and thousands in other agencies. And employees and park advocates worry about natural resource implications of the administration’s direction more broadly: budget freezes, lease termination at some offices for natural resource staff, and likely more firings under a looming “reduction in force” the president has ordered.

Add to that Trump’s headlong push for more energy development and mining on public lands and it’s hard not to see a bullseye on the government’s longstanding efforts to preserve American species deemed so precarious that they are listed officially as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The half-century-old act protects such vulnerable plants and animals as grizzly bears in Yellowstone, tiny birds found only in Hawaii’s tropical forests, blubbery-looking manatees in Florida, and close to 1,000 rare plants across the country. Signed by then-President Richard Nixon, the ESA is the government’s promise to fend off their extinction.

Under the act listed species are due recovery plans and myriad survival aids — things like habitat protection and restoration, removal of invasive predators and non-native vegetation, and even captive-breeding efforts to push their populations back from the maw of extinction. The strategies often spark conflict over use of land that’s also in demand for non-conservation goals. During his first term, Trump redefined what constitutes critical habitat for listed species and allowed economic impacts to be considered when listing species. The Biden administration partially reversed the changes, but it's expected Trump will revert the rules.

Now, the broad-sweep disruption pushed by Trump and his downsizing chief Elon Musk, under the stated rubric of rooting out waste and fraud, is casting doubt on the future of efforts to preserve species. It’s unclear how the chronically understaffed Park Service might prioritize budgets and employees as the specter of staff reduction hangs over everyone, but the Traveler has previously reported that indications point to a view of natural resource positions as disposable.

At the same time, the Republican-led Congress is striving to overhaul the Endangered Species Act itself in ways that would weaken species protections.

Once thought extinct, black-footed ferrets have been recovering thanks to the Endangered Species Act/NPS file

The political road looks rocky for ESA listed species, said Elaine Leslie, retired chief of biological resources for the National Park Service.

“This is going to have long-term impact, there’s no doubt,” she said.

“There are myriad examples of species that are at risk that will likely become endangered if some of this administration’s actions follow through,” she added in a sentiment shared by many environmental organizations and former Park Service officials. “I’ve been a wildlife biologist over 40 years and I’ve never seen this in or out of the government. I think we’re in trouble.”

Questions about job security and longevity surround the return of Park Service workers in the face of  potential force-reduction layoffs yet to come. The Traveler emailed questions to the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service about protecting ESA-listed species in the current environment, but neither would discuss the matter.

Amid this uncertainty, the Traveler explored potential impacts on endangered species programs, based on Trump-era dictates thus far, and looked into the role of natural-resource employees. What do they do and why does it matter?

Who Will Save The Birds?

In Hawaii, Eric-Preston Hamren wanted to ensure after he was fired as nursery manager that Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge on the Big Island didn’t lose the 3,000-plus potted koa seedlings and 10,000-plus germinating seeds that he’d nurtured over nearly a year at the slim-staffed refuge. Once mature enough, they will be planted for reforestation on the slopes of Mauna Kea, a vital habitat for at-risk species that include four ESA-listed bird species.

To ensure its birds don’t end up like the 71 Hawaiian bird species that have permanently disappeared, Hakalau is returning pastureland to forest on the dormant volcano, increasing canopy cover by nearly 50 percent from 1990 to 2024, according to a recent study using Landsat imagery.

“Without this restoration,” Hamren said, “these birds are in a direct line for extinction."

So, after the Fish and Wildlife Service fired him and two colleagues on Valentine’s Day, Hamren, 35, decided to volunteer in his old nursery post, where he’d always hoped to spend the rest of his career.

Hamren was officially reinstated in late March along with his two fired coworkers: the invasive species specialist who protects the birds from feral cats and pigs whose wallows fester with deadly mosquitos, and a seed technician who collects bushels of native seeds and guides volunteers to help collect and plant them.

Losing the expertise of those three from the refuge staff of about a dozen would have been “a big loss,” said Debbie Anderson, president of Friends of Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge. Regarding the firings, she added, “I don’t think people are aware that that decision-making is going to be so detrimental to these important parts of the ecosystem … How said it would be to lose all these species because of those actions.”

A brightly-colored ‘I‘iwi, Haleakalā National Park / Mark Kimora via NPS

A Nervous Time

On Maui island, weeks of life-and-death uncertainty surrounded six fragile honeycreeper species in and around Haleakala National Park after Trump in January froze federal funding that was aimed at keeping avian malaria, carried by mosquitoes, from completely wiping them out. 

But the millions of dollars that had been approved during the Biden administration ultimately were released in late March to keep the crucial state-federal program going, the Traveler learned. That means the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project can continue releasing incompatible male mosquitoes to mate with the region’s females, a pairing that makes their eggs fail.

Scientists had said an interruption in the weekly release could be devastating for the birds’ survival, potentially driving them to extinction.

In California’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, reinstatements were expected for 10 fired workers, including some who protect habitat for the park's 35 threatened or endangered species, like the Mission blue butterfly, Franciscan manzanita, and western snowy plover shorebird.

Angie Wu, a 24-year-old biological science technician who was fired, said her work involves landscape management supporting biodiversity and “improving habit that was critical or important to endangered and threatened species.”

Her three-person crew hacks out invasive grasses along Redwood Creek where endangered coho salmon swim upstream to spawn, planting native vegetation that enables insects to fall into the water, “ a really important food source for the salmon.”

Creeping And Fatal

At Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, a long-needed crew leader managing invasive species was among the Park Service employees fired in February, said Jim Schaberl, the park’s retired division chief of natural and cultural resources and a 35-year Park Service veteran.

Those crews, wielding chainsaws and herbicide, take on invaders like the oriental bittersweet vine that can spiral up a tree and suffocate it.

Constant monitoring is needed to keep invasive and non-native species at bay in Shenandoah National Park/NPS file

“We’re chalk full of invasive plants here and there's an annual program to try to address that,” in particular to keep them from reaching rare ecological communities at the park’s higher elevations, which is also habitat for the critically endangered Shenandoah salamander, said Schaberl.  

But the workforce is chronically short-staffed, and Washington’s political whipsaw makes conservation work more difficult, he said.  

“All of a sudden you can't hire the crew that you are planning to work on that project, or you can't use your credit card because it's frozen right now and you needed to buy that equipment to do that field sampling, and now you can't do it. Whatever the draconian measure, it really impacts the ability to do those day-to-day functions,” he said.

Counting And Cataloguing

Many worry that staff reductions also could impede monitoring, a foundational aspect of ESA work to understand the health of species. It requires valuable field work: counting rare plants and nest eggs, tracking black-footed ferrets, and listening for hard-to-spot forest birds.

“The lifeblood of intelligent ecosystem management now is monitoring,” especially given the impacts of global climate change, said Tim Coonan, a wildlife biologist retired after 23 years at Channel Islands National Park where he led the successful effort to recover the endangered island fox.

Changes “will be caught by these long-term ecological monitoring programs, as long as they're in place," he said. "If not, you have no idea what's going on, and you're going to lose species.”

The kelp forests of Channel Islands National Park attract divers, snorkelers, and lobsters/NPS, Brett Seymour

Kenan Chan, a biological science technician and lead fisheries diver, was among six Channel Islands employees fired in February and recently received word to return to work. He conducts monitoring the park started more than four decades ago: counting and measuring species like sea stars and abalone in shoreline tidepools; and diving into the marine kelp forest that’s home to more than 1,000 species of plants and animals to record species information. 

“What's important for people to understand is, from a biological and from a scientific perspective, having 40 years of data is incredibly valuable,” Chan said. “You get a much clearer understanding of the natural variability of these ecosystems, of these species, and you can better understand the impacts that they're having.”

“Understanding what is a natural change versus an anthropogenic, human- caused change, a short-term change versus a long-term change -- these are all things that we're able to track, because the data is a long-term data set” he told the Traveler.

Monitoring also informs fisheries management and has been instrumental in establishing several marine reserves in waters around the Channel Islands, protected from fishing and extractive activities, the Park Service says.

Monitoring at Channel Islands identified the decline of island foxes, leading to their recovery, and prioritized removal of introduced species including cattle, sheep, elk and feral pigs.

The habitat is improved thanks to the work of park employees and partner organizations, said Russell Galipeau, the park's former park superintendent. “But who knows what's going to happen tomorrow?” he said. “And if we stopped monitoring, will we have the information to be able to know what to do? Will there be resources to do anything about it?”

Hoots In The Woods

In the Pacific Northwest, monitoring of northern spotted owls, a threatened species, was curtailed this spring in Oregon and Washington when Forest Service seasonal biologists were caught in Trump’s hiring freeze, according to Taal Levi, Oregon State University associate professor who collaborates with the Forest Service on processing and analyzing the data.

The annual surveys track owls with acoustic devices in keeping with the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994 that followed years of conflict over harvesting of old-growth forest, the habitat for the spotted owl and many other species.

Seasonal monitoring typically starts in March when teams trek into forests to strap recording devices on trees within 25 million acres managed by federal agencies. The devices note the owls’ locations and prevalence, which helps inform management decisions on where logging can occur to avoid harming them.

Since the Forest Service was blocked from hiring 20 seasonals for the task, on top of a workforce already reduced in budget cutting last fall, the agency is using skeleton crews of permanent employees to place only about 25 percent of its planned 4,200 monitors, the Traveler has learned.

Monitoring of northern spotted owls was hamstrung by personnel cuts inflicted on the U.S. Forest Service/NPS file, Emily Brouwer

The Park Service also conducts acoustic monitoring for northern spotted owls, using a combination of seasonal and permanent employees, in Olympic, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, Golden Gate, Point Reyes National Seashore, and North Cascades national parks, and anticipates proceeding as usual this spring and summer, said spokesman Scott Clemans in the NPS Pacific West region.

Yet unknown is how a March 1 executive order from Trump to expand and speed up timber production in national forests and other public lands might affect the owl or any other listed species. Trump’s order directed federal agencies to look for ways to bypass endangered species protections, and to suggest legislation that “improve timber production and sound forest management.”

Congressional Crosshairs

The ESA, which is credited with preventing the extinction of nearly 300 species, also is under attack in the Republican-led Congress, where critics see it as a bloated tool of anti-development activists. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said it “has consistently failed to achieve its intended goals and has been warped by decades of radical environmental litigation into a weapon instead of a tool.”

He is sponsoring legislation to overhaul the ESA, “focusing on species recovery and streamlining the ESA permitting process,” and hindering “frivolous litigation,” among other provisions.

Defenders of Wildlife called it an “anti-wildlife bill” aiming to “gut core protections that safeguard America’s wildlife by prioritizing politics over science, fast-tracking species to extinction.

Where They Work

Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by Musk, also is targeting many federal office spaces for closure, including several where employees work on habitat and endangered species issues, notably scientific and research oriented. 

One listed on the DOGE lease termination website is a Bozeman, Montana, building that houses the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a multi-agency group of scientists and biologists. Their long-term monitoring and research on grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is key to management decisions on the landscape, said Chris Servheen, who was the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service for 35 years before retiring in 2016. 

Without the team, “the management of the grizzly bear in the Yellowstone ecosystem would collapse, and fundamental issues like what is the sustainable mortality level, the cub production, the survival of adult females — all that would not be gathered,” he said.  

The bears were eliminated from 95 percent of their range with Western settlement and were down to fewer than 300 animals in 1975 when brought under ESA protection. The population is now up to about 2,100 individuals, but they occupy only about 5 percent of their historic range, said Servheen.

Western states have sought to remove grizzlies from the federal ESA list, saying they threaten communities and farms. Trump’s Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, has voiced support for shifting management to states.

But advocates say that with human and livestock encroachment, and climate change impacts, the bears still need federal protection. “Bears are part of the history and the heritage of the American West. And if we allow them to disappear, then we would be losing part of our heritage, and, part of wild nature,” Servheen said. 

‘What’s At Stake'

Strides under the ESA are many. Captive breeding has saved species that were down to a few remaining individuals, including the majestic California Condor and the sweet-faced black-footed ferret, from vanishing as the Passenger pigeon did.

National parks are key to the effort, as more than 600 endangered and threatened species can be found across the National Park System in more than 200 park sites. Protecting them involves such work as removing non-native trout that threaten native fish in Yellowstone National Park and endangered yellow-legged frogs in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks; spear-wielding divers at Biscayne National Park who take out voracious lionfish invaders to protect native fish and reefs; and even vaccination of black-footed ferrets at Badlands and Wind Cave national parks against sylvatic plague and treating prairie dogs with insecticide against disease-carrying fleas.

An Elliptical Star Coral at Dry Tortugas National Park after an antibiotic paste had been applied/NPS, Rachel Johns

In the Caribbean, crews work at Virgin Islands, Dry Tortugas, and other park system sites to battle stony coral loss disease, which attacks threatened elkhorn coral, a key reef builder.

“Our national trend has been to preserve and protect our natural national treasures which are both plants and animals and the ecosystems they live in,” Leslie said. “What I see starting is pulling the funding -- whether it’s for contractors or park staff – these are the very people that monitor not only these ecosystems but also these species.”

"They're not sitting in front of computers all day. They’re out there monitoring what’s happening on the ground, for the benefit of the species, the benefit of the people, the benefit of the ecosystem.”  

The coming months will reveal how well these protectors of the nation’s most vulnerable plants and animals, and the species themselves, will fare in the era of shrinking government.