National Park Service

Overview

Every reference entry describes the same National Park Service: created by the Organic Act of August 25, 1916, steward of 433 units across more than 85 million acres, charged with conserving America’s natural and cultural heritage for future generations (U.S. National Park Service). That description is accurate and no longer sufficient. Since January 2025, the agency has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce — more than 4,000 positions, according to the National Parks Conservation Association — through mass firings, buyouts, early retirements, and a hiring freeze (Outdoor Life). The administration proposed cutting its budget by 37%, the largest reduction in the agency’s 110-year history; Congress said no (CNN). Meanwhile visitation keeps hitting records, and the agency is fighting over what its own interpretive signs are allowed to say (CNN). The standard profile tells you what the Park Service was built to be. The verified 2025-2026 record tells you what is happening to it.

A workforce cut by a quarter

The break came on February 14, 2025, when roughly 1,000 Park Service employees — most of them probationary workers — were fired in a single day as part of a government-wide reduction effort led by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (CNN). Employees have since called it the “Valentine’s Day massacre.” One of them, ranger Sam Peterson, had delayed the start of a new permanent position to help with former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral; a government-wide hiring freeze had already halted his promotion, and a month later his termination email read, “It has been determined that you are not effective at your job” (CNN).

Multiple lawsuits followed. In March 2025 a judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering agencies to reinstate the fired probationary employees, finding the government had dismissed them for performance reasons it knew “good and well” were a lie; in September 2025 the same judge issued a final ruling calling the firings illegal but declined to order reinstatement, noting the employees had “moved on with their lives,” a ruling the government appealed (CNN). Peterson was offered his old job back but had already signed a lease and moved on (CNN).

The Valentine’s Day firings were only the visible edge. Since Trump’s return to office, the Park Service has lost approximately 4,000 permanent employees — about 24% — through layoffs, buyouts, early retirements, and a nine-month hiring freeze, per the NPCA (CNN). That collapse sits atop a longer slide: the agency had already lost some 2,000 permanent staff between 2011 and 2024 (CNN). Although the hiring freeze was lifted in October 2025, separate Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget policies cap federal hiring at one new employee for every four who leave — so most park vacancies stay unfilled (CNN). Adjusted for inflation, the agency’s budget is 20% smaller than in FY2002, and staffing is down 23% over the same span (Outdoor Life).

The strain lands just as parks fill up. At Yosemite, the reservation system was eliminated and visitation surged 45%, which the NPCA’s Emily Douce called “devastating” — “almost like a Disneyland or Disney World, rather than enjoying a peaceful place in a park” (CNN). Bill Wade, a former ranger who leads the Association of National Park Rangers, told CNN morale is “the lowest it’s ever been that anybody can remember” (CNN).

The budget war

For fiscal year 2026, the administration’s discretionary budget proposal included $1.2 billion in NPS cuts — a 37% decrease, the largest in the agency’s 110-year history (CNN). Congress, with bipartisan support for park preservation, rejected it and passed a budget with just a 2% decrease (CNN). For FY2027 the administration again asked for more than $1 billion in cuts; the House Appropriations Subcommittee approved just a 1% cut, though the final budget was not settled as of September 2026 (CNN).

But appropriations have not translated into staffing. John Garder, who has tracked NPS budgets for the NPCA for 15 years, told CNN that parks are being told not to use the money on staffing, as lawmakers directed, but on repair projects, wildlife monitoring equipment, or landscaping equipment: “It’s an affront to Congress when both parties provided sufficient funding for the level of staff that they used to have” (CNN). Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the approach in May 2025 congressional testimony, saying the department had “hired thousands and thousands of people into the national parks system” — but Garder said those were seasonal employees, not permanent replacements, with permanent hires numbering only 500 to 600 (CNN). Meanwhile, Senator Angus King and colleagues wrote to Burgum demanding transparency about redirecting park funds toward what King called “vanity projects” in Washington, D.C. — ornamental fountains, the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and covering statues in gold leaf — none of which were among the Park Service’s top construction priorities (CNN).

The fight over what the parks can say

The staffing collapse is one front in a broader campaign over how America’s public lands tell the nation’s history. In spring 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directing federal agencies to remove content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” setting in motion revisions to interpretive signs and materials across national parks on subjects from slavery and Indigenous history to climate change (CNN). Within weeks, QR codes appeared in parks nationwide inviting visitors to report anything they found objectionable — “snitch signs,” critics called them (CNN). A seasonal ranger at Mount Rushmore described the process: a visitor scans the code, the complaint goes to Washington, and if deemed credible, staff are told to remove the material or be fired (CNN).

At least 45 signs covering topics from climate change to Native American history were altered, according to the advocacy group Save Our Signs (CNN). At Grand Teton, staff were ordered by phone to take down part of an exhibit asking visitors to consider the legacy of Gustavus Cheyney Doane, an explorer and soldier involved in the 1870 massacre of Piegan Blackfeet tribal members — “there’s no trace” of the order, a former ranger said (CNN). In May 2026, the Park Service released its database of 35,700 public submissions received through the QR system: about two-thirds were used not to flag exhibits but to defend them or criticize the policy, and fewer than 2% used the tool for its intended purpose (CNN). The pressure extended to personnel: Yosemite wildlife biologist SJ Joslin was fired in August 2025 after hanging a transgender pride flag from El Capitan while off duty (CNN).

What the agency is, on paper

Beneath the crisis sits the institution the reference works describe. The National Park Service was created on August 25, 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, establishing a new federal bureau in the Department of the Interior to maintain the national parks and monuments then under the department’s management (U.S. National Park Service). It has since grown to 433 individual units covering more than 85 million acres in every state, the District of Columbia, and the territories, with a mandate to conserve the nation’s natural and cultural heritage for current and future generations (U.S. National Park Service).

That mandate extends beyond park boundaries. The Park Service administers the National Register of Historic Places, the federal list of properties deemed worthy of preservation — and on July 10, 2024, it listed Lincoln Beach in New Orleans, the formerly segregated amusement area (U.S. National Park Service; Lincoln Beach Amusement Park). And the most-visited presidential memorial in the system belongs to it as well: the Lincoln Memorial, built between 1914 and 1922 to honor the 16th President, is administered as a unit of the Park Service’s National Mall and Memorial Parks (U.S. National Park Service; Abraham Lincoln).

That is the paradox the profile has to hold: an agency chartered in 1916 to keep America’s heritage “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations,” now operating with a quarter of its permanent workforce gone, its budget a political football, and its own signs under review.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the Park Service’s current director or exact current headcount, because no fully-read source verified them. It does not repeat the $24 billion deferred-maintenance figure, a reported “hub-and-spoke” reorganization plan, or a reported $67 million diversion of visitor fees to Washington monument projects — each appeared only in snippets, not in sources read in full. It does not assert that any specific budget or staffing decision caused any specific on-the-ground failure; the causal framing comes from the NPCA and other advocates as reported, not from independent verification. And it does not resolve whether the administration’s reinterpretation campaign ultimately removed or restored any particular sign beyond the cases CNN documented.