Cuts to national parks couldn't come at a more dangerous time

On Tuesday night, as President Donald Trump spun fantastical tales to Congress about the "hundreds of billions of dollars" Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has supposedly saved by firing federal employees, sitting in the audience was a woman named Kate. Until a few weeks ago, Kate was a ranger at Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota. But on Tuesday evening, she was in Washington as an unemployed guest of the state’s junior senator, Democrat Tina Smith.

"Musk and Trump should have to face the hardworking Park Rangers they sacked," Smith insisted on X. And indeed, they should. But more than that, Musk and Trump also should have to face Americans over the dangerous situation they’ve created.

The mass firings come right before the tourist season for the National Park Service, when an estimated 325 million people are expected to check out the Grand Canyon, Zion, Yellowstone and other iconic parks. But federal employees don’t only hand out trail maps and rescue lost hikers. Across hundreds of millions of acres of national parks and national forests, many of them also do the grunt work of preventing, mitigating and fighting wildfires. Because climate change is making such fires more frequent, more unpredictable and more destructive, the cuts couldn’t come at a more dangerous time.

By firing employees like Kate, Musk and Trump are putting an untold number of Americans who visit, work and live in and around public lands at greater risk. As I write this, for example, more than 200 wildfires are burning on federal land in the Carolinas, with flames getting uncomfortably close to homes and businesses in the resort town of Myrtle Beach. Blame a mix of unusually hot, dry and windy weather. Similarly unusual weather rolled into Los Angeles in January, leading to a firestorm that killed 29 people and leveled almost 60 square miles, including a decent chunk of the Angeles National Forest. Total damage and economic loss is expected to run as high as $275 billion.

According to a recent report from the congressional Joint Economic Committee, wildfires now cost the U.S. between $394 billion to $893 billion every year, when factoring in property damage, health impacts and pollution.

Nevertheless, following Trump’s call to haphazardly downsize the federal government, DOGE ousted roughly 3,400 probationary employees from the U.S. Forest Service last month. Brooke Rollins, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, insisted the employees weren’t "operational firefighters." But many had duties dealing with wildfire prevention and worked as secondary firefighters.

As Lanny Flaherty, a marine biologist, who told ABC News: "When a fire breaks out, we’re out there like everybody else getting into the fray."

Meanwhile, at the National Park Service, where Kate worked, about 1,000 probationary employees lost their jobs and another 700 with more experience decided to take buyouts. All told, about 9% of the agency’s overall workforce is gone. As with the Forest Service, many were secondary firefighters and otherwise spent time clearing overgrown and flammable brush from trails.

Unsurprisingly, there has been pushback. A couple of weeks ago, a group of protesters hung an upside-down American flag over El Captain at Yosemite. Last weekend, I watched as dozens of people angrily waved cardboard signs and chanted "public lands in public hands" at Saguaro National Park in Arizona. Many of the fired employees have gone viral for sharing their stories on social media.

There are indications that some of this is resonating. A few Forest Service employees have reported being rehired; more could be soon. On Tuesday, the Trump administration responded to an order from a federal judge in San Francisco, announcing that it would scrap an earlier directive to fire probationary employees and instead let federal agencies come up with their own plans for layoffs.

So far, though, officials continue to warn that public lands — particularly in Western states, where the largest national parks are — remain vulnerable.

In some ways, the firings mark a U-turn from Trump’s first term. Trump told reporters while touring the scorched California mountain town of Paradise in 2018 that there needs to be more "raking and cleaning" of the "floors of the forest." So why would he oust a bunch of those rakers and cleaners in his second term?

The answer is — once again — Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial governing blueprint for the Trump administration. It calls for more federal lands to be opened to commercial logging.

Last week, Trump appointed former lumber industry executive Tom Schultz to lead the Forest Service. He’ll replace Randy Moore, a civil servant who spent his career as a regional forester and was so bothered by the mass firings that he retired. Schultz is widely expected to prioritize an executive order that Trump signed over the weekend that would ramp up timber production across 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands, ostensibly to reduce wildfire risk. Climate scientists, however, warn that clear-cutting massive stands of healthy trees will only increase such risks.

"This Trump executive order is the most blatant attempt in American history by a president to hand over federal public lands to the logging industry," Chad Hanson, a wildfire scientist at the John Muir Project, told the Guardian. "What’s worse, the executive order is built on a lie, as Trump falsely claims that more logging will curb wildfires and protect communities, while the overwhelming weight of evidence shows exactly the opposite."

When wildfires inevitably do break out, Americans should remember to hold the Trump administration and Musk accountable. Without park rangers like Kate, expect more preventable disasters on public lands.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.