Cuts to national parks couldn’t have come at a more dangerous time
In 2018, Trump said US forests needed more ‘raking and cleaning’ to prevent wildfires. He just laid off a lot of those rakers and cleaners
ON TUESDAY (Mar 4) night, as President Donald Trump spun fantastical tales to Congress about the “hundreds of billions of dollars” Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) 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.
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