April 24, 2025

NPS workforce receives an email from an Associate Director requiring that every NPS employee review their personnel records for accuracy and submit an updated resume to prepare for reduction-in-force. The deadline for this request is two business days. The only employees exempt from this requirement are those who took the buyout options (VERA, VSIP, or the Deferred Resignation Program).

In addition to previous positions, resumes are required to include degrees, certifications, training, and “any other information that can be used for qualification purposes for positions as part of the workforce optimization efforts.”

Many employees find that their data shows incorrect information, and the site set up to review the data and upload resumes experiences multiple glitches.

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April 18, 2025

In a late night secretarial order, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced he was giving up oversight of DOI and handing full control of the department’s organization and staffing to Tyler Hassen, a DOGE operative. Conveniently, Hassen is also a former oil executive for Basin Energy in Texas.

The order states in part, “…the Department will be unifying and consolidating many of its functions…this will include human resources, information technology, financial management, training and development, international affairs…”

While they claim this consolidation will create a more efficient system, in actuality, it will eliminate large amounts of agency specific knowledge, making it less efficient and less effective.

This order gives full and complete control over NPS, BLM, USFWS and other Interior bureaus to Hassen, without requiring him to report to Burgum.

This means Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.

“DOGE’s unelected bureaucrats in Washington have no idea how to staff a park, a wildlife refuge, or a campground. They have no idea how to manage a forest or prepare for fires in the wildland-urban interface. But Doug Burgum just gave DOGE free rein over all of that.”

-Jennifer Rokala, Executive Director for The Center for Western Priorities

April 18, 2025

The Office of Personnel Management proposes a rule to reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as "at-will" employees. This rule, which renames Schedule F employees as Schedule Policy/Career, would make it easier to fire federal workers.

This is another attempt by Trump and his allies to strip civil service protections from federal workers.

The White House claims this rule would address "unaccountable, policy-determining federal employees who put their own interests ahead of the American people's."

However, the Fact Sheet put out by The White House states “[t]his rule empowers federal agencies to swiftly remove employees in policy-influencing roles for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives, without lengthy procedural hurdles”.

The motives behind this rule are further clarified in a social media post by Trump:

"If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job."

April 14, 2025 (Approximate)

Federal agencies are in the planning phases of implementing large-scale job cuts via the Reduction in Force (RIF) process.

The first step in a RIF is identifying positions and areas that may be affected followed by considering other strategies, like voluntary early retirement authority (VERA) and voluntary separation incentive payment (VSIP), to find employees who choose to voluntarily leave before a RIF takes place.

While we don’t have specifics as to what positions will be cut and when, we expect further information around this date and will make updates as we know more.

April 7, 2025

NPS Director, Jessica Bowron, sends out an internal directive instructing park superintendents to get creative with staffing in order to focus on visitor experience. This comes right after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered the National Park Service to ensure parks are properly staffed "to support the operating hours and needs of each park unit."

Instead of lifting the hiring freeze and stopping a reduction-in-force, the administration is asking the national parks to, once again, do less with EVEN less.

Staffing suggestions include: borrowing staff from other parks, reassigning existing staff, reaching out to state parks, and using volunteers and partner organizations. All the while insisting park rangers act as if everything is normal.

"As in other years, we are working hard to ensure we make this another great year for visitors. National park employees are dedicated problem solvers used to working around obstacles and will continue to work hard to provide memorable experiences this summer”.

-Rachel Pawlitz, NPS chief of public affairs

April 3, 2025

Secretary Doug Burgum releases secretarial order 3426 which orders that the National Park Service ensure that “any closures or reductions to operating hours, seasons, or any visitor services (including trails and campgrounds), in whole or in part, must be reviewed by the NPS Director…”

This order effectively removes the power of each individual park’s superintendent to exercise their own judgment regarding staff shortages or other contingencies that make it unsafe or impracticable to keep an area of the park open.

Furthermore, it creates inefficiencies and possible dangerous situations as higher-ups will be required to review all decisions from all parks, causing major delays.

This comes as parks are gearing up for the busy summer season and have already been forced to close popular trails and campgrounds due to low staffing. Worse, further losses to staffing are expected as wide-spread layoffs are being prepared in the National Park Service as part of their Reduction-in-Force plan.

These efforts are a blatant attempt to act as if it’s “business as usual” in the NPS. To be clear, drastic staffing cuts and interruptions to seasonal hiring, thanks to DOGE interference, has major affects on the parks and will affect your visit.

March 31, 2025

DOGE operatives sought and received what they termed “full” or “system” access to the DOI’s payroll, human resources, and credentialing systems. This gave them access to payroll records and controls associated with more than 276,000 federal workers.

This raises inherent security and privacy issues as this type of access could allow them to overwrite code to look at the W2s and other personal information of, or even to change pay rates or stop payments to, federal workers - with no oversight. NY Times

March 27, 2025

An executive order seeking to end collective bargaining for any agencies dealing with “national security,” is released. Although this order is stated as affecting certain specific agencies, a majority of federal agencies are impacted, including the Department of the Interior.

Multiple federal unions took legal action against the order, calling the move illegal.

March 27, 2025

Elon Musk and DOGE staff member Steve Davis claim, without basis, that an $830,000,000 contract awarded for surveys about national parks was cancelled by DOGE as part of their efforts to “improve efficiency”. The NPS discretionary budget is about $3.5B. A contract that would have consumed almost a quarter of the entire NPS budget is, to say the least, highly implausible.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum repeats these claims at a cabinet meeting. No contract was ever found and never even appeared on the DOGE website. CBS News

March 20, 2025

NPS reported they would rehire 400 of the terminated employees and the remaining 600 would be placed on administrative leave indefinitely. NPS later revised their statement to say they would rehire all 1000 employees. They were also awarded back pay for the time during which they were illegally fired.

The names of these illegally fired park rangers reappeared in NPS payroll systems, but it is still unclear how many were reinstated, are on administrative leave, or did not return for other reasons.

March 13, 2025

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, presided over by Judge William H. Alsup, granted a Preliminary Injunction broadening a temporary restraining order against the OPM and its Acting Director, Charles Ezell. They found that the termination of probationary federal employees was illegal because OPM had no authority to order it. 

The judge also forbade OPM from giving any guidance to federal agencies on which employees should be terminated.

March 11, 2025 (Approximated)

NPS employees notice the Severance Pay Eligibility section of their employee benefits statements have been changed without any notice or explanation.

Previously, this section indicated whether or not the employee was eligible for severance pay. At some point between the end of February and March 31, this eligibility is no longer indicated on the statement. In its place is a link to Fact Sheet: Severance Pay which is a web page created by OPM that can be edited at any time.

Analysis of the “fact sheet”, before and after the DOGE takeover, has been analyzed and compared.

March 10, 2025

NPS Departments are directed by the Trump Administration to prepare proposals for how to reduce the NPS payroll by 30%. It is stated that this 30% reduction would include the probationary employees that were illegally fired previously.

As of now, these plans have never been released and it is unclear how the 30% would be calculated now that illegally fired employees have now been re-hired.

March 5, 2025

Newly-released NPS data showed that visitation records were broken in 2024, with NPS sites experiencing over 331.8 million visits, surpassing the 2016 record of 330.9 million visits.

Contrary to standard procedure, NPS employees are instructed not to “issue a press release or other proactive communications, including social media posts.”

This was a blatant attempt to minimize record visitation numbers while staff at all levels are being cut from the ranks.

“Visitation data from 2024 will go live on NPS.gov on March 5, 2025. There is no external communications rollout for 2024 visitation data”

March 4, 2025

440 federal properties are listed to be sold by the General Services Administration. This included the Robert F. Kennedy Building (Department of Justice) and the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI). One day later, the list of properties is quietly removed from the GSA’s website.

March 3, 2025

Members of the House Natural Resources Committee confirmed that the Trump Administration planned to close over 2 MILLION square feet of building space used by the Department of Interior across the country, including at least 33 National Park Service buildings.

The building on the chopping block include museums and visitor centers such as the NPS lease for the Cadillac Hotel in Seattle, which serves as the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.

February 26, 2025

OPM publishes a memo directed to heads of executive departments and agencies entitled “Guidance on Agency RIF and Reorganization Plans Requested by Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” This memo states that “Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs)” with agency plans due to OPM no later than March 13, 2025.

February 25, 2025

All government payment cards (similar to credit cards), are frozen leaving parks & regional offices unable to purchase essential supplies. This includes items such as toilet paper, paper towels, first aid supplies, gas for ranger vehicles, cleaning supplies, snowplow repair parts, and even payments for park cell phones and utility bills.

Eventually, DOI decided to allow 1-3 individuals within each of the 12 NPS regions, to hold payment cards with a higher, but still limited, amount of $50,000. Those individuals were tasked with fielding and reviewing every purchase request in their region. 4 out of every 5 parks did not have a single employee on site with purchasing power.

After a month of inefficient purchasing procedures, DOI released a few more cards, with almost all parks now up to one card each. This still means inefficiency and long delays when ordering supplies.

February 25, 2025

The Department of the Interior quietly removes, and makes void, all current Employee Performance and Appraisal Plans (EPAPs) for 2025. This information was only disseminated within the Department of Interior’s OneINTERIOR All Employee Digest, seemingly hidden among other small print news items. All performance plans, had already been removed from the system.

DOI performance plans not only document past performance, but also communicate future expectations. They function as a mutually agreed upon agreement between the employee and the employer, signed by both at the beginning of each year. Lack of these documents creates confusion regarding position expectations and performance metrics.

February 22, 2025

On February 22, after Trump pushed him to be “more aggressive,” Musk posted on his social media platform: “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

An email sent by OPM followed, giving workers until 11:59 p.m. on February 24 to list five things they accomplished in the previous week.

The "failure to respond will be taken as a resignation” was never communicated in emails received from the new government-wide HR email address or through any official channel.

February 21, 2025

Elon Musk, “senior adviser to the president” and a leader of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) attends the 2025 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) where he is gifted a chain saw by President of Argentina, Javier Milei. Musk proceeded to brandish it onstage, yelling, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!”

February 19, 2025

Internal guidance is released to NPS employees regarding what should be communicated to the public, stakeholders and partners. These statements are crafted to cover up the staff & budget cuts and behind-the-scenes harassment of federal employees and to give a forward facing appearance of business-as-usual in the parks.

The topline messaging emphasizes we are “enhancing the visitor experience as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management.”

This messaging was encouraged to be “mixed and matched” with options such as:

“NPS is working closely with the Office of Personnel Management to ensure we are prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people” and “we’re committed to keeping access to national parks seamless, so that everyone can enjoy the beauty and wonder of these treasured landscapes.”

February 14, 2025

The Trump administration, through DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), led by Elon Musk, initiated significant workforce reductions across various federal agencies. On February 14, approximately 1,000 NPS employees were illegaly terminated.

Many of the terminated employees were on probationary status, a classification for federal employees during their first year of employment or first year in a new position. These employees were targeted because this status typically allows for dismissal without extensive procedural requirements.

The administration justified these terminations by generic language citing poor performance, even in cases where employees had documented universally highly positive evaluations.

"…determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills and abilities do not meet the department's current needs."

February 13, 2025

In response to Donald Trump’s executive order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," OPM instructed federal agencies to remove gender identity and LGBTQ+ issues from their communications.

On February 13, the NPS began altering web pages, including on the Stonewall National Monument website. Terms such as "transgender" and "queer," were removed and "LGBTQ+" was changed to "LGB," effectively erasing mentions of transgender contributions to LGBTQ+ history. Entire pages referencing queer history were removed.

Women and people of color’s stories were also removed as were references to climate science.

Some of these federal webpages have since been restored following public outcry and legal intervention, but the Stonewall National Monument webpage remains heavily altered.

See these removed pages and histories at Rangers Uncensored.

January 28, 2025

The “Fork in the Road” email was sent from OPM to approximately 2,000 federal employees. This email offered a deferred resignation program, which allowed employees to resign by February 6, 2025, in exchange for continued pay and benefits through September 30, 2025.

“If you choose to remain in your current position…we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency”

January 23, 2025

All federal employees receive notice that DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) programs are canceled. Employees are directed to report any colleagues attempting to get around the ban:

“We are aware of efforts of some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language…failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”

-Walter Cruickshank, Acting Secretary of the Interior

January 23, 2025

Employees receive test emails from OPM (Office of Personnel Management) instructing them to reply, as they are testing a way to email all federal employees at once. This is not normal.

OPM employees will later claim an unknown person came into the office and plugged in an external server without permission, referring to it as a “hostile government takeover”.

January 23, 2025

NPS abandons job offer commitments. Any individual who had been hired to a permanent or term position within the National Park Service but has not received an Official Offer Letter at the end of onboarding OR has an EOD (start date) later than 2/8/2025 has their offer rescinded.

Many of these individuals had already packed up and moved to new areas for duty and had signed housing agreements. No recourse is provided except supervisors filing for an exemption to the hiring freeze; all exemption requests we believe to have been denied by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

“Please be advised that the National Park Service is unable to fill the (job title) position at (park site) at (location) at this time. As such, your job offer has been rescinded at management request.”

January 20, 2025

A presidential memorandum instituting a federal hiring freeze across the executive branch was issued. This freeze prohibited filling vacant federal civilian positions and creating new ones.

Currently in effect for 90 days from the date the order was issued.

“As part of this freeze, no Federal civilian position that is vacant at noon on January 20, 2025, may be filled, and no new position may be created except as otherwise provided for in this memorandum or other applicable law.”

January 20, 2025

Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States.

Renaming of National Landmarks: On inauguration day, President Trump signed Executive Order 14172 entitled "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness," directing the renaming of two national landmarks. This order mandated the reinstatement of the name "Mount McKinley" for Denali and the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America."

Also included in this Executive Order is the following: “The Secretary of Interior may solicit public and intergovernmental input regarding additional patriots to honor, particularly in light of America's semiquincentennial celebration, and shall recommend action to me, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.”