While the Trump administration hurts to shorten expenses and eliminate federal jobs, even the people who work in the national parks are the most popular and least politicized institutions in the country – directly in the crosshairs.
Last week, the seasonal workers, the 433 national parks and historical sites, including Yosemite, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, E -Mails, began “canceled” with few further explanations.
The step triggered panic in the ranks of the parking workers and threw the vacation plans of hundreds of millions of people who visit the parks every year. Hundreds – and possibly thousands – from Park Rangers, who react to medical emergencies, as well as employees of the visitor center and the crews, clean the bathroom and empty dump trocks.
In many of the larger and most popular parks, the seasonal workers are inferior in terms of numbers all year round, so that it is difficult to imagine how the parks will work without them, a surveillance vide that asked about it, not out of fear to use before retribution measures.
“For me it is unfathomable that we can do a large park without the seasonal,” she said. “You are essential; They carry out the parks at the operational level. “
In 2021, the Yosemite National Park worked 741 employees in the summer season, compared to 451 on the National Park Service website.
Scott Gediman, a spokesman for Yosemite, did not answer e -mails and phone calls in which he applied for a comment. Media contacts in the office in Washington, DC of the agency, did not answer either.
In addition to 63 called Parks – nine of them in California, more than any other state – the National Park Service manages 370 other sites, including National Monuments, national historical sites and national battlefields. The entire land mass under your supervision is more than 85 million tomorrow.
And they are among the worshiped and most beautiful morning in the USA and attract more than 325 million visitors in 2023.
The e -mails that shine job offers for parks for parks seem to come from a wider Trump administration that sets freezing for federal authorities, part of a coordinated campaign to reduce the federal budget and to weaken a bureaucracy -Trump and its followers call it the “deep state” – which he claims that a large part of his first agenda has thwarted behind the scenes.
While many government agencies are inevitably involved in the country's polarizing political war, the parks are among the few public places where people can escape all stripes. Exhausted by the dispute over cable coat shows and social media feeds? Go under the stars in Yosemite and walk between the huge trees in Sequoia or watch the sun rises over the silent desert in Joshua Tree. What could be more cleaning?
Certainly no visit to a national park bathroom this summer when the setting of the setting actually applies.
In previous shutdowns that result from the budget disputes of the congress or the Covid 19 pandemic, the facilities in the parks deteriorated at the parks at a alarming speed. Non -authorized visitors left human feces in rivers, painted graffiti suddenly untouched cliffs, molested wild animals and looked the toilets such as “crime scenes”, said the surveillance vine.
“It is only scary how bad things can be when places are left when nobody is watched,” she said.
In politics it is apparently lost how many people sacrifice to take over the seasonal jobs that are now being lifted. Many workers organize their whole life for the temporary slots and hope to finally transform them into permanent careers. In the low season, they do all types of secondary employment skipatrouille, drive on the ambulance to ensure that they are available when the summer tourist season occurs again.
When the dreaded emails ended up in their inbox last week, many potential workers remained crawling and wondered whether they had to cancel travel plans to remove the lease and align another summer job.
And it is not that the park jobs are a way to wealth. Payment is lower than in many careers of the private sector, and the housing costs can be in remote gateway communities on the edges of the parks of Himmelhoch. People do it because it is the career they have dreamed of since their children.
“We have always joked that we were paid in sunsets,” said Phil Francis, chairman of the Coalition to protect the Americas National ParksThe more than 3,100 current, former and retired employees and volunteers of the National Park Service.
Francis worked for the Parks system for 41 years, including stints in Yosemite and Shenandoah National Park, before retiring as a superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway in 2013.
“The longer we pause, the less likely it is that the parks can open,” said Francis for the main summer season.
It is not just the structure of garbage and graffiti that Parks Supervisors are worried if they don't have enough employees. It is the security of the visitors. “People are injured, they are lost,” said Francis, so enough rangers have to be at hand to answer: “When things go wrong.”
There is also the economic damage that the many hotels and companies are dependent on park visitors, and from the families who have already made flights, rented cars and hotel reservations can be assumed that the parks are open and functional this summer .
Francis said that many of the families he had met during his career saw trips to the national parks as a transitional rite, an opportunity to come outdoors and celebrate one of the essential joys of an American.
“There are some families who come every year for decades and make it a tradition,” said Francis.