‘They Can’t Do Their Jobs’: Trump Issues $1 Spending Limit for All Parks Workers

The ground continues to shift beneath the nation’s National Parks workers. After seeing sweeping layoffs just before the busy summer season, the National Park Service has now had its purchasing power all but eliminated as well.

Another executive order from President Donald Trump has suspended the spending authority, travel approvals, and credit card purchases for the entire U.S. Department of the Interior, including the National Park Service (NPS). According to the Feb. 26 executive order, employees will have a spending limit of $1 for the next 30 days.

As for future spending, all spending authority will be confined to two people for each NPS service region, some of which include several states. Yosemite National Park, for example, is part of the Pacific West Region, which has about 5,000 employees.

“How can 5,000 people talk to two employees?” Don Neubacher, a former superintendent at Yosemite National Park, told GearJunkie this week. “It basically is a freeze, and it makes it impossible for park employees to get their work done on a daily basis.”

Trump’s latest executive order applies to more than the Park Service. According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit watchdog organization, it also impacts the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which will now have just two people designated as the “primary purchasers” for the entire agency. BLM manages 245 million acres of public lands.

“It’s going to be a bottleneck with all sorts of requests coming in to the same person who has to approve them,” Chandra Rosenthal, the director of Rocky Mountain PEER, told GearJunkie. “This is part of the larger plan to make federal employees quit … It’s just a crisis moment right now.”

A Rocky Summer Ahead

As Trump and Elon Musk have moved to drastically reduce the size of the federal government, the outdoor industry has sounded the alarm over how those cuts will impact Americans’ access to public lands. The NPS and U.S. Forest Service have lost thousands of employees in recent weeks, leading to widespread protests at national parks across the country.

Losing the power of the credit card strikes another blow to an already understaffed and underfunded part of the government, according to Elaine F. Leslie, a 25-year veteran of the NPS and board member of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.

“Credit cards are hugely important,” Leslie said. “They pay the lights and water in offices and visitor centers with credit cards. And contractors. And leases. Not just university researchers but specialized maintenance or other issues. You also use them to pay for any equipment for field work, or equipment for repairs.

“And there are many restrictions already on their use, so this is all stupid, and the point is to harass park staff. And to continue to make their lives miserable and uncomfortable and to ensure they can’t do their jobs.”

The additional restrictions on park workers will mean reduced services.

Tangible Impacts

That likely means longer traffic jams on busy days and loss of basic maintenance (like restocking bathrooms with toilet paper). But Trump’s cuts to the park system also represent a public safety issue, according to Neubacher, who spent 36 years in the park service before joining the board of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.

Yosemite National Park sees hundreds of rescues every year, he said, and they’ve already lost staff. The additional restrictions from Trump mean that park managers are unable to make emergency hires.

When a climber gets in trouble on El Capitan, for example, park officials will often hire experienced climbers “on the spot” to help with the rescue. That’s not possible with Trump’s restrictions, Neubacher said. As a result, anyone thinking about visiting one of America’s national parks should be extra cautious this year, he said.

“People need to take a serious look at where they’re going this summer,” Neubacher said. “The public needs to know that with limited staff, visitation will stress the remaining employees … I don’t think it’s going to be a pretty picture.”

Chaos & Uncertainty

After the park service lost thousands of workers over the last few weeks, many of the fired employees took to social media to share their stories. From reducing wildfire danger to keeping people safe, the lost rangers made it clear how the impacts would affect visitors.

“I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position. I mean, they just can’t,” fired park ranger Alex Wild wrote in a social media post. “I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.”

National park visitation soars during the busy summer months, when millions of people descend on the country’s parks. If parks stay open despite the reduced staff and purchasing power, longtime park officials like Neubacher worry about a repeat of 2019’s government shutdown.

When the federal government shut down in 2019 during Trump’s first term, many national parks experienced serious damage. Joshua Tree National Park saw trees cut down and graffiti painted on ancient boulders. Trash and human feces piled up in Yosemite National Park as a result of “bad behavior” and limited staff to curb it.

Former park officials say that chaos could happen again this year. In fact, The New York Times reported Wednesday that 4,000 campsites across California’s national forests could close this summer as a result of lost positions within the U.S. Forest Service. Trump has also moved to increase logging of the country’s national forests.

For Lydia Jones — one of many young park rangers fired by Trump last month — this moment is a wake-up call for parks advocates to complain to their local representatives.

“Encourage them to investigate these terminations,” Jones wrote in a social media post. “Tell them you are worried about the future of our public lands with many employees that provide essential services being terminated.”