Read more about impacts to the Blackwell School and the Fort Davis National Historic Sites.
STUDY BUTTE — As people across the country swapped teddy bears and boxes of chocolate on February 14, nearly 1,000 National Park Service employees received an extremely unromantic valentine from Washington D.C. “The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs,” the email read. “It is necessary and appropriate to terminate your appointment.”
Of those 1,000, five worked at Big Bend National Park. Kelon Crawford, a physical scientist who monitored air, water and dark sky quality for the park, knew that tensions had been mounting for weeks — her supervisor had been asked to provide a list of probationary, or “career conditional,” employees up the chain of command for review.
Probationary employees are those who have served one year or less in their post, but she’d never heard of anyone getting fired before their year was over unless they’d stopped showing up or committed a heinous crime. “In my mind, I didn’t think anything was going to happen,” she said.
Deputy Superintendent Rick Gupman began an all-staff meeting that Friday by saying that he had been asked about the probationary employees but had no update. Then his phone buzzed — an email from Washington. He didn’t have specific names yet, but the layoffs were on.
Crawford’s heart sank. She fought back tears the rest of the meeting and went home, texting her husband, Eric Hamm, to meet her as soon as possible.
Similar scenes were playing out all over the country as Crawford joined 2,300 total Department of the Interior personnel who were laid off from their jobs that day under the direction of the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Over 2,000 workers were also laid off from the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), which falls under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Since President Trump’s inauguration on January 20, the OPM has become a tool wielded by another acronym swirling in the federal alphabet soup: DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by unelected billionaire Elon Musk. Musk has promised to cut federal spending by any means necessary in order to reduce the government’s $36.22 trillion deficit.
DOGE has claimed savings of upwards of $55 billion, but its methods have proved controversial, sparking outrage and triggering lawsuits across the country. Even those generally supportive of the department’s mission are confused by its targets — why start with the National Park Service, which represents less than one fifteenth of one percent of the national budget?
The layoffs at the National Park Service have hit a nerve, prompting protests across the country. On Saturday, images began to circulate on social media of the American flag hung upside down from the face of El Capitan — one of the most iconic peaks in the National Park system — by Yosemite National Park employees. Per the flag code, the red white and blue may only be flown upside down in times of “dire distress.”
Yosemite lost a dozen staff members on Valentine’s Day, including its only locksmith, responsible for the maintenance of law enforcement gun safes, vaults stocked with valuables, copying keys for employee housing and freeing tourists trapped in bathrooms. “The people that fired me don’t know who I am, or what I do,” the locksmith, Nate Vince, wrote on Instagram. “They simply don’t understand this park and how big and complex it is.”
Vince’s and Crawford’s stories — and those of thousands of others who staff America’s public lands — have become a rallying cry for millions of people alarmed about the future. If no one has the keys, then who’s driving?
“This land was made for you and me”
As the flag hung upside down in Yosemite Valley, folks gathered in Study Butte at a pair of highway pullouts just west of the entrance sign to Big Bend National Park. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” blasted on a Bluetooth speaker while a crowd that fluctuated between 40 and 70 flashed homemade poster board signs at oncoming traffic.
“No park ranger? You’re in danger!” one sign read.
“There is nothing so American as our national parks,” read another.
Most passers by honked and waved. A handful flipped the bird. One man rolled down the windows of his truck and pumped his fist in the air. “Hail Trump!” he shouted.
The gathering was organized in part by Hayley Pines, who has guided in Terlingua for nine seasons. She was inspired to get her friends and neighbors together after hearing about what had happened to Crawford.
Pines anticipated that — without people like Crawford — the parks would suffer. “They might just have to close access to the land, which was set aside over a hundred years ago for all of the American public and for people visiting America to enjoy,” she said. “Everyone will lose access to public land that’s meant to be for everyone, no matter who you voted for.”
Pines got a bloody valentine from DOGE all her own. During the brutally hot Terlingua summers, she’s worked 11 seasons across the West for the United States Forest Service, a Jacqueline of all trades running mule teams, working trails and serving on fire crews. On the 13th, she got a call from her USFS bosses, whom she considered friends and assumed just wanted to catch up.
It turned out that word had gotten out about the impending layoffs. “They wanted to tell me before I read about it in the New York Times,” Pines said.
Organizing the gathering was not without its ups and downs. A friend advertising the event on Facebook had to take down his post after it devolved into a flame war over the use of the term “protest,” with pro-Trump community members concerned that “crybabies” and “snowflakes” might run riot. They decided to keep it simple, inviting folks one at a time through word of mouth.
Longtime Terlinguan Jenny Schooler carried a fan-favorite sign: “SHITTER’S FULL,” mounted on a long piece of cane. The sign is a reference to the NPS’s waterless pit toilets, which must be manually cleaned and packed out on mules from remote locations.
To Schooler, it’s not just potty humor. “It’s important to realize that the people laid off aren’t just waste and bloat,” she said. “They are essential to everyone’s enjoyment of the outdoors and aren’t something that’s going to be done by AI. For years and years and years to come, we’re not going to be able to automate taking poop out of backcountry toilets.”
While Schooler is a believer in the spiritual mission of protecting wilderness, she also knows that the park service is her community’s financial bottom line. It’s estimated that national parks generate about $15 for every dollar of investment by the federal government. Last year, Big Bend drove $56.4 million in economic growth in “gateway” communities like Terlingua.
If the park closes — or if the state of its skeleton crew facilities drives visitors away — that could mean the end of a way of life. “Terlingua wouldn’t be here without the National Park Service,” she said.
“Big Bend is a barometer”
Big Bend National Park is so remote that it’s easy to forget that its fortunes rise and fall with the rest of the world. If you take a look at its history, you can see funding and focus fluctuate as park superintendents and presidents come and go — not unlike reading a tree’s rings for evidence of long-ago drought. “The park is always facing moments,” said Michael Welsh, a professor of American history at the University of Northern Colorado. “Big Bend is a barometer of one administration pivoting one degree to the next.”
Welsh studies the history of institutions and focuses on the Southwest. Around the turn of the millennium, he undertook an ambitious project at the request of park staff — what would become Landscape of Ghosts, River of Dreams: an Administrative History of Big Bend National Park.
Rattle off a few buzzwords from recent political discourse — economic collapse, fascism, socialism, drought, climate change, DEI, nuclear war — and you’ll be able to find them somewhere in the story of the park, which was envisioned during the Great Depression. Much of its original infrastructure was built by Black and Chicano men hired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s extensive web of New Deal programs. In the spirit of the president’s “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America, many early boosters of the park eventually wanted to see it straddle both sides of the river.
By the time the deed to Big Bend National Park crossed the president’s desk in 1944 — a week after D-Day — the world was a much different place, cold in the shadow of the atomic bomb. But in the age of breadlines, the park had been a glimmer of hope. “The 1930s was this magic moment for the Park Service, and then it was gone,” Welsh said. “It almost vanished overnight.”
While other presidents have initiated notable infrastructure projects since 1944, no president leaned on developing parks as a way to boost economic growth to the same degree. The way the parks have been monetized has changed, too, evolving into a corporate model that rakes in billions of dollars a year — most of which go to benefit folks outside the NPS. And the dream of a collaborative Mexican and American park has all but died, with only a concertina wire cross marking the spot.
Marcos Paredes — who served as a ranger at Big Bend National Park for more than two decades — said that prior to the Trump administration, the biggest shift in the park he remembers seeing between presidents came with George W. Bush. That may have partly been an accident of history — 9/11, which took place during his first year in office, prompted a major shift in foreign policy, which manifested in Big Bend as the closure of informal border crossings like Boquillas.
As a border park, Big Bend was uniquely impacted by these closures, as well as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the reorganization of older iterations of the Border Patrol, U.S. Customs, and the brand-new agency ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) under its umbrella.
Paredes maintains that even those impacts feel faint compared to the events of the first month of Trump’s second term in office. “This is an incredibly uniquely bad time,” he said.
Parks around the country have cut hours and access in response to this month’s layoffs, and Paredes said Big Bend might have to follow suit. During his time with the NPS, he had the unfortunate duty of standing guard at the gate at Persimmon Gap during a government shutdown, turning people away who had come to see the park from all over the United States. “It was the worst duty I ever had with the park service,” he said.
The park has temporarily shuttered for budgetary shortfalls a handful of times in its history. Administrations have experimented with a few different arrangements — locking gates, leaving gates open and shuttering facilities — but no matter which path of action is chosen, unattended visitors tend to behave badly.
After each shutdown, park staff return to find four-wheeler ruts in cryptobiotic soil and graffiti on ancient rock art panels and trash piled up everywhere. After COVID-19 closures, rangers discovered that Chisos Basin guests, disgruntled by the state of the unattended restrooms, had taken to defecating in the parking lot.
Reduced or nonexistent staff also has an impact on visitor safety. In a place as remote as Big Bend, search and rescue operations take a village. One particularly harrowing example: during a government shutdown in 2019, a man hiking in Santa Elena Canyon fell and broke his leg. There were no rangers on duty, requiring a rag-tag team of fellow guests to help carry him to safety.
Paredes was not optimistic about the future of the park, should the layoffs escalate. “They used to tell us we needed to do more with less,” he said. “They’re getting to the point where they’re going to start doing less with less.”
“Double or triple duty”
Unfortunately for Big Bend National Park, there may not be a kindly band of strangers waiting at the bottom of the cliff for rescue. The chaos and confusion wrought by Musk and his team has had a huge impact on staff morale — to a degree that may have permanent repercussions for an administration doing its best to keep up with D.C.’s demands.
On Valentine’s Day, Crawford’s husband, Eric Hamm — a maintenance worker for the park — had also been in the fateful all-staff meeting but was attending remotely. Thanks to a bad connection, he’d missed the grim news at the top. When Crawford filled him in, he knew what he had to do — resign. “I’m not going to work for an organization that does that to people,” he said.
Hamm and Crawford are both longtime tri-county residents who have worked in and around the parks for years. They eventually settled in Alpine, but decided to give South Brewster County another go after suffering the loss of their daughter. They felt a change of scenery in a place they both loved might help them heal.
Less than a year after their big move, their dreams dried up with the click of a far-away mouse. Both were technically probationary employees, but as a Marine Corps veteran, Hamm was spared. (Ironically, Crawford had served the job she had gotten fired from before, about a decade ago — anyone who bothered to look at personnel records would be able to see that she’d served more than one year in that position.)
Hamm’s principled decision taps into a much longer-term problem flagged by folks like Welsh and Paredes: the erosion of faith in the NPS as an honorable, stable career path for young people who want to serve their country — a demographic that made up a huge chunk of the thousand layoffs.
Cary Dupuy, regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that the responsibilities of folks in the NPS have ballooned alongside visitor counts while staffing and budgets stay relatively stable. Since 2010, visitation to national parks has jumped 16% while staffing has declined 20%. “Many times they are having to pull triple or double duty,” she said.
Last week, the Trump administration announced that around 50 people who were fired on Valentine’s Day would have their job restored and promised to hire 7,700 seasonal workers, higher than the average of 6,350 seasonal workers hired per year by the Biden administration.
Dupuy thinks that’s too little, too late. “Seasonals are not a replacement for a permanent park service staff,” she said.
Though some were cheered to see “essential” jobs in the Park Service being restored, the term “essential” is up for political debate. The very premise of Crawford’s job — that humans have a long-term, irreversible impact on the environment that needs to be studied — is not a sentiment shared by many on the American right wing.
A shorter-term ecological storm in Big Bend is brewing after the Valentine’s Day layoffs, which claimed the lone maintenance worker responsible for running the park’s recycling program. In a region that faces chronic issues with recycling — municipal programs in Marfa, Alpine and Presidio have flickered on and off over the past few years — the national park’s comprehensive system was something to brag about.
The recycling program is key to prolonging the life of the national park’s landfill, whose days are numbered — park leadership estimates about five to seven years, and there is no set plan in place for how to go forward once the final diaper is tossed in the hole.
Dupuy said that — apart from contacting your congressional representatives to urge them to protect the park service — being trash conscious is one of a few ways that folks can support remaining employees while staffing is in flux.
As a professional advocate, Dupuy said that a good attitude toward staff goes a long way, especially during an emotionally fraught high season. “Be good park visitors, especially now more than ever,” she said.
Representatives for Big Bend National Park declined to comment for this story. For more information about the National Park Conservation Association, visit https://www.npca.org/.