AN OPEN LETTER TO DOUG BURGUM
TO: Doug Burgum
And the administration turning the NPS into a politicized shell of its former self
FROM: Resistance Rangers
Rangers (off-duty and former) who refuse to let you muzzle the NPS
SUBJECT: We can tell you which signs to replace. But the damage goes way deeper- and we can't tell you how long it will take to repair.
On June 15, Jessica Bowron, acting National Park Service director, provided a declaration about the lawsuit regarding Secretarial Order 3431, "Restoring Truth and Sanity," and claimed personal knowledge of everything within it.
We'd like to agree with some of what she said. But first: as the rangers who researched, designed, and taught these signs and materials, we would like to tell you exactly what you can do today to begin undoing the damage. Then we’d like to tell you what no court order can repair.
Thins We Can Fix:
Exhibits? Hang them back up. Brochures? Pull them out of the closet. Park films? Hit play. Podcasts? Just reupload them. Webpages? Click publish. Any ranger could handle this and still get the visitor center open on time, provided you drop the politically-motivated micro-management. You say this is too hard to fix, but how about you let us try?
You claimed in court the censored exhibits were “discarded” but maybe you don’t know what that means? We obviously would not throw our own exhibits away. Under 44 U.S.C. § 501 and FAR Subpart 8.802, all printed NPS publications using appropriated funds must be purchased through the Government Printing Office, which keeps records. Directors Order #11D says that final interpretive products are permanent records (category 6.A.2 under the REIM guide), meaning they can’t just be thrown away. We aren’t lawyers, but we know what "permanent record" means. And we know the different between “discarded” and “we’d rather not look.” You’ve really damaged the National Parks, but we can fix a lot of it– just let us try.
Things The Lawsuit Can’t Fix:
We are ready to reverse the censored exhibits, but restoring the trust you’ve destroyed is going to be harder. This spring you cut communication positions across the service and then “consolidated” the rest into a cage at the Department of Interior. You’ve slashed park personnel by more than 25% since coming into office, despite rising visitation. You’ve created a culture of fear, reprisal, and repression. Restoring censored brochures won’t fix that. The slow, careful work of telling complete and accurate stories has been deprioritized and frightened out of existence.
Every social media post and website edit now requires clearance through a centralized approval office. Climate pages that can't be updated don't need to be taken down—they just go quietly out of date. The NPS has stopped investing in its own scientists, historians, and experts, which achieves this administration’s goals of silencing those voices.
New contracts require researchers and cooperating partners to produce work conforming to SO 3431, and the scholars who provide the National Park Service with its baseline scientific and historical data are both declining to sign and told their work doesn’t comply with an amoral and dubiously legal Secretarial Order. These are not partisan actors. They are experts chosen specifically for their independence and rigor. At a moment when the NPS is leaning more heavily than ever on external partners to fill the gaps left by its own gutted staff, requiring ideological conformity from those partners isn't a policy. It's a guarantee that the work won't get done.
The lawsuit asks a judge to reverse sign removals. It cannot reverse a bureaucratic apparatus designed to make truth-telling too slow, costly, and precarious to sustain.
Jessica Bowron said it herself: the "publication office has lost significant capacity in recent years," and that reinstating these materials "would likely cause impacts to visitors through limited closures and disruption of visitor services." We agree. What you have discarded is not just exhibits or dedicated staff, it’s decades and decades of institutional knowledge about America’s treasures. The rangers who deeply knew these places and communities are gone. To do this work right takes years, and happens long before a visitor walks through the door. It takes time in archives, in consultation with Tribes, and in careful (and non-partisan!) editorial decisions. You could begin to make amends by investing in that workforce again. Telling all American stories is not a luxury. It is the mission.
You cannot restore the trust of Tribes who were not consulted before their histories were erased. You cannot give back the experience to visitors who came to Independence National Historical Park, Acadia, Arkansas Post, Grand Teton, or Muir Woods while the signs were down and the full story wasn't being told. Those visits happened. You also cannot undo the chilling effect on rangers who watched their colleagues get fired, their content flagged, and their professional judgment get second-guessed by people in DC who have never led a program before.
Crucially, the NPS is one of the few things in this country that Republicans and Democrats agree on, and the public trusts us. That kind of trust takes generations to build. But seemingly just one administration to destroy. You are turning parks into vehicles for political ideology rather than allowing us to fulfill our mission statement. And the public who trusts us are the ones who lose.
What we want:
We need an independent review of every submission in the SO 3431 database to determine what can be restored now, what needs time, and what may be permanently lost.
We demand a full accounting of which Tribal consultation agreements were violated and a real plan to repair those relationships.
We want to be very clear: Censoring exhibits is only part of your attack on “America’s Best Idea.”
We want parks to once again be empowered to make their own decisions about what stories need telling. Rangers and interpreters are the experts of these histories: not a centralized approval office in D.C. The bureaucratic review of every post and webpage edit is killing stories before they can even begin to be told. We need expanded hiring authority to restore the rangers who do that work, because those communications positions are being quietly eliminated and deprioritized. The visitor experience doesn't just happen at the front desk. It happens in the years of research, relationship-building, and careful craft that precede it.
The NPS was built on a promise: to protect these places and their stories for every American, not just the ones this administration finds convenient. Some of what you broke can be fixed with a storage key and a Tuesday afternoon. The rest will take years of reinvestment—if it can be repaired at all.
The question isn't whether you know what to do. It's whether you'll do it before history—which, as it turns out is kind of our specialty—remembers that you didn't.
Transparently yours,
Resistance Rangers