A quarter of the country's National Park Service positions have now been cut in 2025, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. The group is now warning of more cuts in President Trump and the U.S. House's budget proposals.
WUNC's Will Michaels spoke with Jeff Hunter, Southern Appalachian Director with the National Parks Conservation Association, about these deep cuts.
This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
What are the practical implications of these staffing cuts?
Restrooms aren't clean, campgrounds are closed, visitor centers have reduced hours, interpretive programming they may have to curtail or cut altogether. A lot of people go to parks to see the ranger in the flat hat tell the story. And with fewer people, you have to do less.
As I understand it, there are three different proposals for National Park Service funding, two of which would cut the agency's budget even more. Help me understand what's at stake if these proposals were to go through and more cuts happen. What else has to go?
The Trump administration's proposal is a $1 billion cut to national parks, and my organization has run the numbers, and we feel that 350 of the 433 park units would need to close if $1 billion was cut from the system. So that's catastrophic. The House budget is not as bad. It has a 6% cut, $176 million, and that would perpetuate the staffing crisis that we're seeing right now.
But there's hope with the bipartisan Senate budget proposal, which keeps funding flat, which in this environment is frankly a win, but it also offers protections for staff, which is really important. It ensures that the administration needs to maintain adequate staff and to protect the resources in our parks.
The Trump administration set a deadline for this week to remove certain signs and photos from national parks that frame America's history as "inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irredeemably flawed." Photos relating to slavery are part of this. As far as you know, did the administration order anything in North Carolina taken down? And if so, has anything been taken down?
I'm not aware of anything specifically that has been taken down or ordered to be taken down. But this is really a slippery slope. In the southeast, where I am, we have a lot of civil rights parks. For instance, how do you tell the story of Martin Luther King Jr. without talking about racism? If racism is seen as divisive and we're going to stop talking about it, you can't tell that story. And frankly, I think the American people can handle the truth.
The National Park Service does the best job in our federal government of telling the story of American history, and we need to allow them to continue to do that without political interference.
How are these cuts affecting morale for those National Park Service employees that are still employed?
Morale is at rock bottom right now. I have a couple of friends who took early retirement under duress, and I talk to them about the situation. And when you don't treat people with dignity and respect - and that's how we all want to be treated - it just makes going to work drudgery and frankly, these people have aligned their their careers with their values.
What they do, they're very, very good at, the actual historians who can unpack information, like at Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park in Tennessee, or the battlefield parks and here in North Carolina and South Carolina. They're the experts, right? And they're unpacking these stories for us so we can understand where we've been and the mistakes we've made as a country so we don't repeat those mistakes.
