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- President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation efforts in the early 1900s led to the establishment of the National Park Service and protection of millions of acres of public land.
- The National Park Service collaborates with Native Nations to protect cultural traditions, artifacts, ancestral homelands, and endangered species.
- Recent reductions in staff at national parks under the Trump administration have raised concerns about operational efficiency and impacts on local economies.
“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources… But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils shall have been still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation.”
These words, spoken by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, laid the foundation for the establishment of the National Park Service in the United States. Roosevelt, a Republican, would likely feel unmoored in today’s political landscape, in which President Trump has undone more protections from United States lands than Roosevelt protected as parks and monuments.
The NPS has experienced significant upheaval since Trump took office in January. The administration laid off 1,000 probationary NPS employees on Valentine’s Day, along with 3,400 Forest Service workers, and another 700 NPS employees chose to resign later that month: all part of the reported goal of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to downsize the federal workforce. This drastic reduction in staff comes just weeks before our national parks’ busiest season, raising serious concerns about operational efficiency.
