Trump is using the shutdown to try and gut national parks

I will never forget the memories my family made this year as we traveled across the country, ticking national parks off our bucket list. 

Thanks to the Every Kid Outdoors program, which provides free national park passes to fourth graders and their families, we hiked through fall leaves at Shenandoah National Park, ice-climbed at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, explored beautiful meadows at Rocky Mountain National Park and witnessed magnificent night skies at Great Sand Dunes National Park. My sons may not remember every valley or vista, but I know they’ll remember that irreplaceable feeling of vastness one gets when visiting a national park for the first time.

Unfortunately, that core belief — that national parks are for everyone, and that they should be preserved for future generations — is under existential threat.

The Trump administration is weaponizing the government shutdown to gut staffing, weaken environmental protections and normalize its ultimate goal of privatizing public lands. The alarm bells are loud, and our response must be louder.

The government shutdown cut nearly two thirds of National Park Service staff, tasking skeleton crews with an enormous responsibility of managing access to national parks. 

Although many visitor centers are shuttered, campgrounds are closed or unmanaged and emergency response is slow or nonexistent, the Park Service’s contingency plan expects most national parks to stay open. This is hardly a realistic ask for a system that spans more than 85 million acres of land and water.

We’ve seen this play out before. During the 2018-2019 government shutdown, national parks stayed open and dealt with overflowing trash, damaged ecosystems, unauthorized entry and vandalism. Now, the administration is insisting on the same, even as oversight vanishes. It is a recipe for disaster.

But the shutdown is simply a cover for more insidious and unpopular plans. The Trump administration has threatened mass firings — euphemized as “reductions in force” — during the shutdown to implement permanent layoffs across federal agencies.

Those threats are actualizing, with the Department of the Interior revealing on Monday in a court filing it plans to issue reductions in force for 2,050 employees, including 270 at the Park Service.

A court order has thwarted those plans, but Interior is likely to move forward once the temporary order is lifted or the shutdown is over. This is happening despite the fact that interest in ensuring public lands are adequately staffed and remain open is an issue spanning both sides of the political aisle.

At national parks, the targeting would likely follow a playbook similar to the mass firings from early 2025: lower-paid rangers, seasonal employees and probationary staff. The Park Service is already operating with 25 percent less staff thanks to Department of Government Efficiency cuts earlier this year.

It is a deliberate weakening of federal agencies charged with stewarding our public lands — the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and more.

Why go through all this pain? Because the ultimate aim — as laid out in executive orders, policy documents and public statements, and echoed in warnings from past Park Service directors — is to justify handing over national parks to private and commercial interests. Once the Park Service is seen as incapable, the argument goes, you might as well “let the market run it.” 

Public lands watchdogs have documented how the Trump administration has long proposed selling or transferring control of federal lands, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum describing them as assets on “America’s balance sheet” that we are getting a “low return” on. 

Nevermind the fact that the Park Service’s own research shows that national parks contribute $32 billion in GDP and generate $55 billion in economic output annually. Much of this talk echoes ideas from Project 2025, which outlined plans to privatize or downsize federal stewardship of public lands to ultimately benefit special interests like oil and gas.

Imagine this: National parks become amusement parks in a pay-to-play model, where private concessionaires decide which trails are open, which rivers are accessible, which valleys are open for drilling and which backcountry zones are cleared for logging. This isn’t fantasy — it’s the final stage of the Trump administration’s plan.

National parks are more than scenic places. They are watersheds, wildlife refuges, classrooms and sanctuaries. This is especially the case for marginalized and low-income communities that have historically been excluded from equitable access to nature. 

Privatization of national parks will further restrict that access, favoring wealthier visitors and weakening protections against extractive industries. 

This move undermines the moral contract of our national parks: that we hold these lands in trust for future generations. We cannot stand by and watch the destruction of the federal agencies tasked with stewarding our national parks and public lands. 

National parks are for all of us — not the president, not politicians paid for by oil and gas lobbyists and not corporations. The stories my sons will one day tell about their summer spent exploring national parks depend on the choices we make now to protect these treasured places for everyone.

Jackie Ostfeld is the director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors For All campaign and founder and chair of the Outdoors Alliance for Kids.