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When Alex Wild found out that he and hundreds of his fellow national park rangers were being fired, he worried about paying his bills, his career, and his colleagues, but mostly about Yosemite’s alpine meadows.
“I’m legitimately concerned about people just ripping their Jeep around the meadow because they feel like there’s no one to do anything about it,” he tells The Independent.
“And maybe there won’t be,” he adds.
Following the abrupt firing of some 1,000 National Park Service employees by the Trump administration last week, rangers like Wild are raising the alarm about the impact the cuts will have on America’s 63 beloved national parks.
It’s not just the meadows he’s worried about — long lines that are already forming at park entrances because rangers who sell tickets have been let go, garbage won’t get picked up, tours will be canceled, campgrounds will be closed, the abandoned wildlife, hikers lost because no ranger was there to guide them and lives at risk as rescue teams are cut back.
“We do so much work protecting the place, and that’s the sort of stuff that is just going to get dropped,” Wild, 35, says. “As a ranger, that’s the part that gets me fired up. That’s my passion and it breaks my heart to think about what’s going to happen to the parks.”
Some of these problems are already hitting the parks, but they are expected to worsen during this summer season when more than 100 million people typically visit.
Wild, who had been a park ranger for some 15 years and with the National Park Service for six of them, worked for most of the year at Devils Postpile National Monument, a stunning rock formation and waterfall that straddles the Pacific Crest Trail in eastern California. For four months of the year, he worked at Yosemite.
Protecting the wildlife and resources in the federally owned parks is a big part of rangers’ work, but they are also there to protect the public. He now believes national parks are about to become more chaotic, and potentially more dangerous.
Wild was the only emergency medical technician at Devils Postpile before he was fired on February 14. In other parks, rescue teams are being cut back.
“Sometimes it’s dramatic like saving someone’s life, and other times it’s preventing something from becoming an emergency, like I’ll find a missing hiker or someone with a sprained ankle,” he says. “But without any sort of rescue response like that, things can escalate and become a potentially life-threatening emergency.”
He estimates that the emergency response time for an EMT trying to reach someone at Devils Postpile would now be roughly three hours.
The cuts to the National Park Service were part of a huge reduction of the federal workforce spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, an advisory board that has been given sweeping powers by the White House to reduce government spending.
The layoffs have impacted all areas of the parks: fee rangers who collect money from parkgoers, park ‘interpreters’ who help hikers and provide educational workshops. Yosemite even fired its sole locksmith.
All probationary employees in the federal workforce were laid off. That broad instruction included long-serving staffers who were in probationary periods for roles they had just been promoted into, meaning the park service is losing experienced staff along with new hires.
That was the case for Wild. He wanted to be a park ranger since he was a teenager and finally worked his way to a permanent role last summer after years of temporary roles.
“I always felt like that permanent job was like the finish line. I worked five seasons as a seasonal before getting that permanent job. But I know people that have worked like 10, and they finally got that permanent job, and then all of a sudden were just dropped,” he says.
“They’re moving fast and breaking stuff. It’s just sloppy, it’s hurting people and it’s putting the public at risk, too,” Wild says.
In response to the cuts, Yosemite has announced that it is suspending the sale of reservations for five of the park’s most popular campgrounds. Park rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico tell The Independent that long lines are snaking around buildings after the firing of ticket office workers.
A job with the National Park Service was never high-paying, or particularly stable — park rangers always joke that they get paid in sunrises. But the layoffs have caused chaos for park employees across the country. Some are abruptly losing the homes that came as part of the job. Many moved to remote areas for the job and will now have to relocate.
Kathryn Brainerd, 30, was working at Badlands National Park in South Dakota in a temporary role when she received a permanent offer to work at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia, where General Robert E. Lee signed the surrender of the Confederate forces.
“I had everything ready to go. I had an apartment, I had furniture ordered. I had moved all my accounts, my banking, my insurance. I moved all that to Virginia already,” she says.
Then, late last month, the offer was rescinded as part of the DOGE cuts on the federal workforce.
Brainerd joined the NPS through a program for veterans after she left the US Navy. She had been an avid hiker since she was a kid and after being stationed in the Pacific North West decided to head to school to study park management. She was ready to commit to a new kind of public service.
Now, she is moving back in with her parents while she looks for new work. And she too is worried about the public’s safety at Badlands.
“When somebody undoubtedly needs to get rescued, there’s going to be really nobody there to rescue them, because we don’t have the funds or the resources or the people,” she says.
“They don’t know what these cuts are doing, not only to the people, but also the parks,” she adds.
Brainerd is now looking for jobs in state parks and nature centers — anything where she can use her skills and education.
Wild says he’s already missing the exciting parts of the job — the rescues and saving lives — but the most rewarding part was the teaching.
“This past year, I had 100 4th graders all come to the park, and I gave them tours of the Postpile and taught them about geology and the importance of parks. That stuff makes a big impact on these kids,” he says.
In the meantime, he hasn’t given up on getting his old job back.
“Everyone’s trying to push back on this. If you look at how hard we all worked to get these jobs, of course we’re gonna work hard to keep them. Of course, we’re not just gonna roll over.”
