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Interior Secretary Burgum is being urged by former NPS directors to reverse course on gutting National Park Service/NPS file

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is being urged by five former directors of the National Park Service to reverse course on his directives impacting national parks, writing that his orders could force superintendents to ignore their congressionally-mandated responsibilities.

Burgum drew the directors' concerns by ordering acting-NPS Director Jessica Bowron to ensure "that all park units remain open and accessible to the American public."

In their letter, the directors also cited a follow-up memo from Bowron to her workforce that said, "[P]ark managers should prioritize activities that deliver the greatest benefit to the greatest number of visitors. ... Work that does not directly contribute to these priorities should be adjusted, scaled back, or deferred as appropriate, and staff that do not directly support these priorities may be redirected to higher priority needs.”

Combined, these directives "suggest, if not outright direct, park managers to ignore their park resource protection responsibilities in favor of providing for visitor services," reads the letter. "We believe that these directions are contradictory with the law and the intent of Congress, and we fear that these messages will put NPS superintendents in a difficult situation when confronted with decisions necessary to protect the resources of the units of the National Park System."

The letter was signed by Jonathan Jarvis, NPS director under President Obama; Fran Mainella (George W. Bush); Robert Stanton (Bill Clinton); James Ridenour (George H. W. Bush); and Ronald Walker (Richard Nixon); as well as 13 former deputy directors. Ethics laws prevented former Director Chuck Sams from signing on since he just left the agency.

It comes in the wake of reports that an upcoming reduction-in-force of the Park Service will be "deep and blunt." The firings are expected to focus on the Park Service's Washington headquarters, regional offices, and the Park Service's Cultural Resources staff and its Natural Resource Stewardship and Science arm (NRSS), a branch that houses the subject matter specialists — paleontologists, air quality scientists, archaeologists, veterinarians groundwater hydrologists, volcanic hazard geologists, and more — who are available to parks when they need that kind of specialized expertise.

President Donald Trump since taking office in January has worked with businessman Elon Musk to downsize the federal goverment. At first the Park Service was forced to rescind offers for seasonal positions; on Valentine's Day some 1,000 NPS employees who were on probationary status were fired; at the same time the administration encouraged federal employees to take a "fork in the road" offer under which they could retire now and remain on the payroll through the end of the current fiscal year in September. A Voluntary Early Retirement offer later was added to the mix. 

The directors' letter pointed to recent demonstrations held at national park sites across the country to protest Interior's firings as a significant pushback to Burgum's decisions. In addition to the firings, an estimated 2,400-2,500 employees, roughly 12.5 percent of the agency's entire workforce, have taken Trump administration offers to resign or retire, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.

The protests "demonstrate how important it is for your office to address understaffing and additional reductions in funding that will further decrease the ability of park managers to effectively manage national parks for the benefit of the American public and in accordance with the law]," the directors wrote.

"We support the need for management efficiency and the elimination of wasteful activities," the letter underscored. "However, we believe that the National Park Service has been engaged in management efficiency for decades. Thousands of volunteers already support the work of the parks. Millions of dollars have been donated by park neighbors and organizations in support of the parks. Thousands of National Park Service positions have been eliminated as budgets have not kept pace with inflation. All of this occurred before 2025. National Park Service employees, who should be on hand to help serve and protect millions of visitors, are under attack."

The letter also noted how important the National Park System is to local economies, and that the gutting of the Park Service, if not reversed, "will have an enormous financial impact on the communities that rely on parks and other public lands that support their economies."

It did not, however, mention Trump's proposed Fiscal 2026 budget that called for more than $1 billion in cuts to the Park Service, an amount that NPCA has estimated could force 350 or more park units to go unfunded. Trump in his budget also called for an unspecified number of parks to be handed over to states to manage.