Trump Ushers In A Bleak Future For Our National Parks
The superintendent, Tina Cappetta, decided to retire early at the end of May. Cappetta suffers from chronic health conditions that are exacerbated by stress. She realized that managing a highly visited federal park through President Donald Trump's workforce cuts was literally making her sick.
'What I was noticing, as this year progressed, is that I was having more bad days,' said Cappetta, who lives in rural Maryland, about 60 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., right across from the park. 'I could see the writing on the wall, health-wise, that it was better for me to leave.'Cappetta worked more than three decades across eight sites within the National Park Service, a career spent not in Yellowstone or Denali but in the less-flashy historical parks that make up a large chunk of the National Park System. She'd planned to work three more.
Her premature exit is just one example of the deep experience being drained from the park service as many employees choose to hang it up rather than face budget cuts, layoffs and uncertainty.
Cappetta worked more than three decades across eight sites within the National Park Service, a career spent not in Yellowstone or Denali but in the less-flashy historical parks that make up a large chunk of the National Park System. She'd planned to work at least three more.
Her premature exit is just one example of the deep experience being drained from the park service as many employees choose to hang it up rather than face budget cuts, layoffs and uncertainty.
Around 100 of the park system's 433 sites — or nearly one-quarter — are without a superintendent right now, according to the office of Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), ranking member of the Senate committee overseeing the park service. Five of the system's seven regional director positions are also vacant.
'The amount of expertise and institutional knowledge that has left the National Park Service over the last couple of months – it really is a major concern,' said Edward Stierli, a regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit that advocates for park funding. 'The future is bleak, and it's going to take a really long time to rebuild that level of talent.'
The park service declined to answer several questions from HuffPost about attrition and layoffs, including how the agency plans to maintain park quality with fewer people and whether certain vacant positions will be backfilled.
There are already signs of strain in the park service at large. The Assateague Island National Seashore, a park on the Atlantic Ocean in Maryland and Virginia, is heading into the July Fourth holiday with no lifeguards on its beaches due to a staffing shortage. The local emergency services director for Chincoteague, Virginia, the town beside the park, has said lifeguards handled 24 rescues last year.
Affection for national parks crosses party lines, and many Republican lawmakers are worried about Trump's plans for the system. After all, the parks contributed an estimated $56 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023, with much of that stimulus going to red areas.
In Allegany County, Maryland, which contains 48 miles of the C&O Canal, nearly 70% of voters went for Trump in November. The park helps boost bed and breakfasts, bike shops and other small businesses.
The park is a prime illustration of what could be lost with Trump's slash-and-burn approach to federal resources and services.
The administration is expected to announce the elimination of more than a thousand park service jobs in an upcoming 'reduction in force.' It already tried to fire around a thousand probationary employees and push many more into early retirement. The White House has put forth a budget proposal that would cut the park service's funding by more than $1 billion and transfer many federal park sites to the states, although state officials would have little interest in managing them.
Even if bipartisan opposition stops the worst of Trump's plans, the park service will almost certainly find itself with fewer bodies and resources in the years ahead. And what many park lovers don't realize is that NPS sites were already strapped for cash before the arrival of Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, despite record visitor numbers last year.
That's certainly true of the C&O. Cappetta served as the park's chief resource manager for a three-year stint starting in 2002. When she returned to be its superintendent 15 years later, she found a staff that was nearly half the size it had been when she left.
'I walked into the room and I'm like, 'Where is everybody?'' she recalled. 'In large part, it's because the budget didn't keep pace with inflation. Visitation is up considerably.'
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The C&O is a quiet workhorse in the NPS system. Though it isn't famous nationally, it has the highest traffic of any park designated as historical, with 4.4 million visitors last year. It follows the Potomac River from the Western Maryland city of Cumberland all the way to Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., featuring terrific views of the river, some cool old lockhouses and a gravel towpath that serves as a major cycling destination.
If you want to protect the park's trees and keep the towpath clear, you're going to want an arborist. And if you want to keep the 200-year-old lockhouses and other canal structures from falling into disrepair, you're going to want a carpenter. Cappetta said that, like herself, those workers chose to take a 'voluntary early retirement,' one of a handful of resignation programs pushed by the Trump administration.
Stierli said the loss of specially trained workers is happening across the park system right now.
'It's really all of these positions, many of them behind the scenes, that visitors probably don't even realize are helping to shape what the entire experience is like,' he said. 'I think you would want to know, as a visitor surrounded by trees, that there is a well-qualified arborist making sure that none of those are going to fall down on you while you're riding your bike.'
Cappetta said that parks may end up having to bug one another to borrow personnel, or try to contract more work out to private firms — a cumbersome process likely to get more difficult as the White House pushes out agency administrators.
The C&O also lost an exhibit specialist who happened to be the park's most experienced mule handler. The C&O currently has two mules — Jen and Julie — that help show kids what canal life was like in the 1800s. Other employees will be picking up more of the mule duties now.
And one of the C&O's maintenance workers is retiring next month, Cappetta said. She described him as the most knowledgeable about a particular region of the park.
It isn't clear if those jobs will be filled. Trump has instituted a hiring freeze across the federal government, though it contains a vague exception for 'necessary positions.' NPS currently has only 43 open positions listed nationally on the government's official site, USAjobs.gov, for a system that covers 85 million acres.
The park service did not address specific questions about staffing at the C&O.
Facing political backlash and anger from park supporters, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered all sites to remain 'open and accessible' and avoid reducing hours or closing visitor centers, even with fewer staff — in other words, to make it look as though everything is fine.
Stierli said this has resulted in specially trained employees at various parks taking up side duties, like fee collection and trash pickup.
To keep up appearances, the Trump administration might focus its impending layoffs on 'back-of-house' positions rather than front-facing staff — think administrative clerks rather than park rangers.
But Cappetta said such cuts eventually filter down to the park experience.
'Those positions make sure that the toilets get pumped… that people's paperwork gets processed [for] their health insurance benefits,' she said. 'There's just a ton of stuff, and there's no fat there to be trimmed.'
Even if parks can fill open positions, it's going to be harder to attract talented people when the system's future looks so uncertain. The park service might sound like a dream internship for many college students and recent grads, but Cappetta said applicants are showing signs of hesitation.
'We had a really hard time recruiting for interns this year, and we pay our interns,' she said. 'We got a lot of feedback — 'Well, we don't know that we want to come work for the federal government. We don't know if there's a future there.' So I anticipate it will be difficult for the park service to recruit.'
How much money could be saved by trimming the park workforce? In general, NPS employees don't make a whole lot. A current job listing for a park maintenance worker starts at $22.79 per hour, for an annual salary around $47,000. A mid-level park ranger position — one that typically requires park experience and graduate school — starts at $73,900.
The Trump administration tried to fire the lowest-paid among them by terminating probationary employees en masse in February. These were, for the most part, workers who had less than two years of experience and hadn't attained full job protections.
The administration attributed the firings to poor work performance, even for employees who had sterling records. Many returned to work temporarily under court order after a judge ruled the terminations were likely illegal.
Cappetta said she and her team had to fire six probationary employees, comprising about 9% of the park's entire staff. One of them had a baby two days later.
Managing employees under such conditions has felt untenable for many supervisors in the federal workforce, knowing they can't provide any clarity on the administration's plans or reassurance that workers' jobs will still be there.
'I care very much about the people that I work with, and, right or wrong, take on a lot of their stresses, too,' Cappetta said.
In a lot of parks, the layoffs and attrition might reveal themselves gradually, through shorter operating hours, less visitor programming or poorer upkeep of trails and structures. Even before Trump began pursuing cuts, the park service estimated it had racked up $23 billion in 'deferred' maintenance — repairs that were already needed for roads, buildings and utility systems.
But the effects could go on display suddenly, like when a summer storm strikes and there aren't enough staff to clear roads and paths. Such was the case on a recent afternoon, when HuffPost sent a photographer to the C&O to shoot pictures for this story.
An extreme thunderstorm downed trees at the park's Great Falls entrance in Maryland, backing up exiting cars for more than an hour. Relief eventually arrived — in the form of locals with chainsaws. They cleared the road while park employees were busy dealing with fallen limbs along other roadways, according to Capetta, who was stuck in the traffic.
'Imagine losing even more staff,' she said afterward. 'It's just not going to get any better.'
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The theory that spawned PPR has been frequently traced back to the Cold War, when Soviet agents allegedly monitored takeout orders to the highest reaches of the U.S. government. Yet it isn't clear the KGB ever relied on such methods. Simon Miles, an associate professor of history at Duke University who has studied Cold War-era spycraft, won't say that he's skeptical of the lore, exactly. 'You can't prove a negative,' he noted. But Miles has seen records from the Stasi, the East German intelligence service that shared information with the Soviets and other Eastern Bloc nations, and nowhere is there a mention of monitoring takeout. 'That's one of these Cold War stories that never goes away,' he said. 'I've never seen documentation to that effect.' Not that Russian spies weren't eyeing the streets around Washington for clues. Documents that Miles studied outlined some of the methods the KGB did use, including whether the government was moving founding documents from the National Archives into secure bunkers and whether many cars were parked past normal working hours at the White House. 'The idea was basically to create a list of indicators which, if enough of them started blinking red, so to speak, you would interpret that to mean that something was actually happening,' Miles said. Pizza, he said, wasn't on the list. Regardless, the 'pizza index' has fascinated people for decades, often fueled by media reports. In 1991, Frank Meeks, then the owner of 43 Domino's outlets in the D.C. area, told the AP that in the days leading up to Operation Desert Storm he had delivered dozens of pizzas to the Pentagon. Fifty-five pies, Meeks bragged, were sent to the White House in the hours before the U.S.-led coalition started an air campaign against Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. In December 1998, Meeks was quoted by a Washington Post reporter during impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton and preparations for Operation Desert Fox against Iraq. The White House and Congress broke previous three-day records for pizza deliveries, Meeks told The Post. 'The Pentagon Pizza Index has been a surprisingly reliable predictor of seismic global events — from coups to wars — since the 1980s,' Alex Selby-Boothroyd, head of data journalism for the Economist, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. 'On the night of August 1st 1990 for example, the CIA ordered 21 pizzas in a single night just before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (a new record). Who says pie charts aren't useful?' But Pentagon ex-workers say times are different now than in the 1980s and '90s. Since the launch of Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash and other delivery services, a new universe of food options has opened up for workers at the Pentagon, White House or CIA. Why would anyone limit themselves to chain pizza? Besides, as multiple people pointed out, the Pentagon already has plenty of food options inside, including Lebanese Taverna, McDonald's, Moe's Southwest Grill, Panda Express, Panera Bread, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, Potbelly Sandwich Works, Subway, Taco Bell, Hissho Sushi and SmokeDatt Barbecue. There's even a pizzeria — Mosaic Pizza Company — but like many of the eateries there, it closes in the afternoon, catering to a rank-and-file staff that's often out the door by 5 p.m. The late-night options are pretty much limited to vending-machine sushi and the Market Basket Basement Cafe. Besides, leaders may not even want to break for food, said a U.S. Army reservist who regularly works in the Pentagon. 'It's just how we're wired,' said the reservist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she wasn't authorized to talk to the media. 'We're just trying to work so we can get it done.' None of the Pentagon workers contacted for this story had ever ordered a pizza at work — cell service is notoriously bad inside the building, one said — nor had they ever seen pizza boxes on a conference room table or in the trash. Which raises the question: Can pizza even be delivered to one of the most secure structures in the country? The Pentagon declined to comment for this story. But the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, its law enforcement agency, said all visitors must pass a background check and have authorized credentials; they and their belongings are also physically screened. All deliveries must be screened and inspected at the Pentagon Remote Delivery Facility just north of the complex. And anything perishable is 'confiscated and discarded,' spokesman Chris Layman noted in an email. But, Layman said, employees may bring in food that they've gotten directly from a restaurant. This appears to include food a staffer might pick up from a delivery driver at, say, the Pentagon Metro. These meals must also be screened and inspected. 'I can see having pizza delivered to a spot outside, but I don't recall we ever did it,' said Philip Greene, a retired U.S. Marine Corps attorney who had an office inside the Pentagon for 12 years. 'It's very anecdotal, but it makes sense. We're going to be burning the midnight oil. Let's get some pizza or Chinese food or whatever.'
