Our Public Lands Are Being Set Up to Fail

DOI, NPS, & USFS Layoffs Will Cause Chaos—And That’s the Point

The destruction won’t come in the form of bulldozers or oil rigs—at least, not right away. First, it will come in the form of overflowing trash cans, unstaffed campgrounds, emergency calls that go unanswered, and human waste piling up in places that should be pristine. It will come in the form of tourists wandering into deadly situations at the Grand Canyon, Zion, Yellowstone, and Joshua Tree because there’s no one left to warn them.

This week, the National Park Service fired 1,000 employees—many of them responsible for keeping parks clean, safe, and running smoothly. The U.S. Forest Service has laid off over 3,400 employees, leaving America’s vast public lands in the hands of skeleton crews. And for what? A depraved attempt to demoralize and punish public servants. You think my characterizations of this administration’s vicious attack on government employees is a bit harsh? Here’s the architect of the plan and current OMB Director Russel Vought’s own words: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Yes, this malicious attack is both dangerous and haphazard, as evidenced by the numerous absurd directives issued at the behest of Elon Musk’s OPM—only to be hastily rescinded after court orders or the realization that they’re impossible to carry out. Federal employees have been whiplashed by villainy and incompetence—like when Small Business Administration staff received emails notifying them of their termination, followed by another email revoking the dismissal, only to get a third email a day later confirming they were, in fact, fired after all. This same chaos extends to our public lands, where the administration is gutting the workforce while simultaneously scrambling to rehire 5,000 seasonal workers ahead of a peak summer season poised for disaster—the same 5,000 they had turned away within hours of assuming power.

The result will be a mess of overcrowding, unchecked destruction, and avoidable deaths.

And here’s the kicker: this is exactly what they want.

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We’ve Seen This Before, And It Was a Disaster

Remember the 2018-2019 government shutdown? The Trump administration insisted on keeping national parks open with next to no staff. The result?

• Yosemite’s roads lined with human waste because there were no staff to clean restrooms

• Trash overflowing and littering our most prized landscapes

• Illegal off-roading tearing up delicate desert ecosystems

• Vandals carving their names into ancient rock formations and petroglyphs

• Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park being literally run over and destroyed

That was just a few weeks without staff.

Now, thanks to these layoffs, this will be the state of America’s public lands for at least the next four years.

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How This Will Play Out

With thousands of public lands employees gone, and many more layoffs to come here’s what’s coming next:

In National Parks

• Campsites will stay open even when they shouldn’t - not because it’s the right call, but because the administration thinks closing them would make them look bad and be contrary to their ultimate goal (see below).

• Trash will pile up, littering our campgrounds, roads, and trails.

• Emergency response will be crippled – search and rescue teams are already stretched thin; now, they’ll be virtually non-existent.

• Deaths will rise at places like the Grand Canyon, where people will wander too close to cliffs, overheat in the desert, or get lost in the backcountry with no ranger support.

In National Forests

• Campgrounds will close, stripping Americans of the rite of passage of pitching a tent beneath a starry night sky—or worse, they’ll be left open and unmanaged, with no rules, no oversight, and inevitable destruction.

• Illegal logging and poaching will surge – because enforcement will be nonexistent.

• Fires will get worse – with fewer firefighters to fight the blazes and fewer staff to monitor conditions.

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Manufactured Chaos to Justify Privatization

Let me be very clear: this isn’t just negligence—it’s sabotage. They will break the system on purpose and then insist that only private industry can fix it. They’ll do this across the government, our public lands will simply be another place to make their case.

When parks are overrun with garbage, when visitor experiences turn nightmarish, when natural resources are degraded, they’ll use the chaos they created to push privatization.

It’s already happening:

• Proposals have been floated to privatize campground management, making it more expensive to visit national parks.

• Corporate interests have long eyed national forests as underutilized land that should be turned over for logging, mining, and energy development.

• Trump’s allies have pushed for more private concessions in parks, another step toward full corporate control.

First, they gut the National Park Service and Forest Service. Then, they sell the “solution” to the highest bidder.

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This Is a Crisis Unfolding Before Our Eyes

This isn’t just about dirty bathrooms and overflowing trash cans—this is about the long-term destruction and privatization of America’s public lands.

What You Can Do

1. Raise Hell – Contact your representatives and demand a reversal of these reckless layoffs and that they support the bipartisan Public Lands in Public Hands Act.

2. Support Public Lands Groups – Organizations like the National Parks Conservation Association, The Wilderness Society, and the Sierra Club are preparing legal challenges.

3. Expose the Damage – If you visit a park and see the destruction firsthand, document it. Take photos. Write about it. Share it with the news media.

4. Call Out the Lies – When they blame “mismanagement” for the crisis they caused, we need to push back with the truth.

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They Want Us to Give Up. Don’t.

This administration thrives on despair. They want people to feel powerless, to grind down the opposition until they’re too exhausted to fight back. Their goal isn’t just to reshape public lands—it’s to break the will of those who care about them, until a scorched, privatized wasteland feels inevitable.

But inevitability is a lie.

I keep a copy of Thomas Macaulay’s poem Horatius in my desk. It tells the story of a last stand against overwhelming forces. Faced with impossible odds, Horatius and his men hold the bridge to Rome against an invading army—not because they expect to win, but because some things are too sacred to surrender without a fight:

"To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late,
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?"

Public lands are the closest thing America has to sacred ground. They belong to no king, no corporation, no billionaire—they belong to all of us. And if we don’t fight like hell for them now, we may not get the chance again. So make some good trouble.