The Law Enforcement Crisis on America's Public Lands
155 million acres of national forests are patrolled by fewer officers than a single state sends to check fishing licenses.
Years ago, I was filming a project for the Forest Service at one of their offices. We’d set up our lights and cameras in a conference room to interview a recreation manager about a unique feature of the forest. While we were getting ready, a man walked in to grab a cup of coffee. He was wearing a law enforcement uniform — not a ranger in the Smokey Bear sense, but a federal law enforcement officer. A badge, a sidearm, etc. An “LEO” in public lands speak.
We got to talking. I asked him what area he covered.
“All of it,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what he meant. All of what? The district? I asked how many other officers there were.
He set his coffee down. “It’s just me. Five hundred square miles. Just me.”
He said it the way a man says something he’s been carrying around for a long time, something he’d given up being angry about because the anger never changed anything. But there was something else in it too. He was telling me because he felt like nobody knew. The fact that 500 square miles of American public land had exactly one law enforcement officer had somehow never made it out of the building. He wanted somebody to hear it.
I was shocked, so I asked him how in the hell that works. He told me that if a body turned up on his forest, and bodies do turn up on national forests, the investigation alone would bury him for weeks or months. During that time, every other crime across those 500 square miles would go unanswered. Every timber theft. Every poaching operation. Every assault at a campground. He’d know it was happening. He just wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. He told me about domestic violence calls at remote campgrounds where backup was two hours away if it came at all. About driving forest roads alone at three in the morning, knowing that if something went sideways, nobody was coming.
I walked away from that conversation stunned. I remember telling my brother, who was still setting up the camera, about it. I remember thinking about it for the rest of that trip. How could that be? Why would we allow this?
At some point life went on and that startling information moved to the back of my head. It’s resurfaced a few times over the years as I’ve seen headlines about crimes on our public lands and as I’ve met more LEOs on our federal lands. Last week was National Police Week. As I watched the Trump administration flood social media with tributes to law enforcement on our public lands, that conversation came back to me. So I decided to dig into the numbers. What I found was worse than I imagined.
Patrolling Alone
The United States Forest Service claims to employ approximately 650 law enforcement officers, according to the agency's own staffing page — which, tellingly, isn't dated. In 2022, USFS Chief Randy Moore stated the agency had “more than 500 law enforcement officers and special agents.” The exact number isn’t publicly known, but it would appear to be somewhere between 500 and 650.
They’re responsible for 192 million acres of national forest and grassland — roughly 300,000 square miles. If we take the higher number from the USFS website, that’s one officer for every 462 square miles of American land.
To understand how absurd that is, consider that California State Parks — the largest state park system in the country, with 280 parks — employs more than 600 peace officers to patrol about 2,500 square miles. That’s one officer for every four square miles. A single state’s park system has roughly the same number of officers as the entire National Forest System of the United States, covering less than one percent of the territory.
The National Park Service is only slightly less dire. In 1986, the NPS employed 2,471 commissioned law enforcement rangers. By 2023, that number had been cut nearly in half. Today, roughly 1,150 commissioned rangers patrol 85 million acres — about 133,000 square miles. One officer for every 116 square miles. The agency’s special agents, the plainclothes investigators who handle complex crimes, are down to 30. Nationwide. For more than 400 park units. In a July 2022 internal memo obtained by the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the NPS Associate Director for Visitor and Resource Protection acknowledged the agency could no longer investigate robberies, meth labs, or human trafficking occurring inside national parks.
The Forest Service has its own special agents, criminal investigators within its Law Enforcement and Investigations division, but they’re included in the same anemic 650-officer total. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains a separate Office of Law Enforcement with 261 special agents and 122 wildlife inspectors focused on international trafficking and smuggling, but on the refuges themselves, the picture is just as bleak.
The National Wildlife Refuge System, 573 refuges spanning 95 million acres of land, is patrolled by fewer than 400 federal wildlife officers. That’s one officer for every 378 square miles. In 2004, the International Association of Chiefs of Police determined the refuge system needed a minimum of 845 full-time officers. Twenty years later, they’re still running at less than half that number. The state of Florida alone has roughly 600 conservation officers. One state. More officers than the entire federal refuge system.
Neither the Forest Service nor the National Park Service maintains a comprehensive, centralized system for tracking crime on federal lands. We don’t even know how bad it is. The agencies charged with protecting 500 million acres of American land can’t tell you what’s happening on it.
They Used to Send the Army
Before there were park rangers, there were soldiers. The U.S. Army patrolled Yellowstone starting in 1886 because Congress wouldn’t fund civilian protection. The Buffalo Soldiers were stationed at Yosemite and Sequoia in the 1890s, protecting against poachers, illegal grazing, and timber theft. Captain Charles Young, one of the first Black officers in the Army, led patrols through Sequoia in 1903. These men were protecting land that a nation hadn’t yet figured out how to value.
When Congress created the National Park Service in 1916, the last military troops were withdrawn and civilian rangers took over. For sixty years those rangers operated with patchwork legal authority — enforcing rules, confronting poachers, responding to crimes — without a clear federal mandate behind them. Congress didn't formally grant NPS rangers law enforcement authority until 1976, when the General Authorities Act finally gave commissioned rangers the power to carry firearms, make arrests, and investigate federal crimes across the entire park system. By then, the parks had been relying on underfunded, undermanned, legally improvised protection for more than half a century. The pattern was already set.
The Forest Service was born in 1905 under Theodore Roosevelt, but its rangers didn’t receive formal law enforcement authority until 1986 — and only because drug cartels were growing marijuana on national forest land. Congress passed the National Forest System Drug Control Act as part of Reagan’s War on Drugs, capping the force at 500 officers. Two years later, they raised the cap to 1,000. That cap hasn’t been touched in 38 years and they’ve never come close to reaching it.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has the oldest law enforcement pedigree of the three. Federal wildlife wardens have been patrolling American land since 1903, when Roosevelt created the first national wildlife refuge at Pelican Island and handed a Florida man named Paul Kroegel a badge to protect it. The Lacey Act gave those wardens real authority two years before the Forest Service even existed. For more than a century, this was the agency that told the world America took its wildlife seriously. Now it can't put a single officer on nearly 200 of its own refuges. Foreign smuggling rings are stripping plants off coastal bluffs and shipping them to China, poachers are executing wolves steps from Yellowstone, and the agency Theodore Roosevelt built to stop exactly this kind of thing is watching it happen with fewer officers than the state of Florida sends to check fishing licenses.
What Happens When Nobody’s Watching
In May 2019, a man named James Jordan attacked four hikers in their sleep on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia’s Jefferson National Forest, killing Ronald Sanchez with a machete and critically wounding a woman who survived by playing dead and walking six miles through the dark to find help. Jordan had been reported to law enforcement repeatedly in the weeks before the attack. He’d threatened hikers with a knife in North Carolina. He’d been arrested in Tennessee for brandishing a knife and chasing people from a trail shelter with a shovel. He was released, returned to the trail, and murdered someone. The jurisdictional patchwork and chronic understaffing meant nobody stopped him. As one trail volunteer put it afterward: “The guy was mentally disturbed. And the citizens were not protected.”
In 2021, the remains of Gabby Petito were found at Spread Creek dispersed camping area in Bridger-Teton National Forest. The whole country watched that case unfold on cable news and wondered how someone could vanish on public land. The answer is simpler and more unsettling than most people want to hear: there’s almost nobody out there.
A popular member of Yellowstone’s famous Junction Butte wolf pack was illegally killed in 2025, sparking a poaching investigation. In 2024 alone, 12 Yellowstone wolves were killed by Montana hunters and two more by poachers. A bullet-riddled mother grizzly was found in a river on the western edge of Yellowstone National Park — the third such killing in seven months. In Montana, a bighorn sheep ram — part of a small, highly visible herd that residents and visitors had been watching all season — was shot and left to rot near Thompson Falls. No meat or horns taken. A cow elk and two calves were killed and left to waste on the Sun River Wildlife Management Area.
In Redwood National and State Parks poachers are coming at night with chainsaws and headlamps to hack into 1,000 year old trees. Rangers have found gashes eight feet across carved into the bases of ancient trunks, the burls ripped out and hauled off to sell on the black market. Those burls aren't decorative. They're the primary way redwoods reproduce. The people doing it know that nearly 40 percent of the world's remaining old-growth redwoods are guarded by a skeleton crew.
Timber theft across the National Forest System costs the government an estimated $100 million every year. On Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, investigators had to use tree DNA, matched against a database painstakingly built by Forest Service geneticists and citizen-science volunteers, to prove a single illegally cut black walnut log came from the forest. The geneticists who built that database work under the Pacific Northwest Research Station — the 100-year-old research program this administration is dismantling and consolidating to a single facility in Colorado. Last month the Trump administration released a budget that zeroes out Forest Service research and orders the agency to “terminate research programs and close research stations.” If enacted the scientists who spent years building the forensic tools that finally gave law enforcement a way to catch timber thieves would lose their jobs and the work would die.
And then there’s ginseng. American wild ginseng, driven by demand from Chinese traditional medicine markets, sells for over $1,000 a pound. Since 1992, rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park have confiscated more than 15,000 illegally harvested roots. One repeat poacher was convicted five times over nearly two decades. On the California coast, an international smuggling ring was caught ripping thousands of native Dudleya succulents from coastal bluffs and shipping them to buyers in China and Korea — stripping entire cliff faces bare. The operation was only discovered because a woman at the post office got annoyed at a man shipping 60 packages to China and called it in. Not a ranger. Not an officer. A woman in line at the post office.
According to the most recent comprehensive study of Forest Service law enforcement, conducted by researchers at the agency's own Pacific Southwest Research Station, roughly 35 percent of USFS officers have been threatened or assaulted on the job. That same body of research found that the number of crimes and related incidents on national forests doubled in a single five-year period while the number of officers stayed flat. Those studies are nearly twenty years old. Nobody has funded an update since. And the research station that produced it, the only institution that bothered to study the problem, falls under the same research program the Trump administration announced last month it intends to terminate.
A Failure Across Administrations
The understaffing of federal land law enforcement is a bipartisan achievement decades in the making, and every living president owns a piece of it. In 1997, the GAO reported the Forest Service law enforcement program included 708 staff. Today, almost three decades later, the number is 650. Through Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump’s first term, and Biden, nobody meaningfully increased federal land law enforcement. The NPS adopted a “No Net Loss” policy for law enforcement staffing in 2001. Then it lost 48 percent of its rangers over the next two decades. The IACP told the refuge system it needed 845 officers in 2004. Nobody acted. The cap Congress set in 1986 hasn’t been touched. Both parties own this.
For decades, administrations of both parties have celebrated our public lands. They've designated parks and monuments and wildlife refuges. They've given speeches about America's natural heritage and what we owe future generations. But none of them funded the people who keep these places safe. They designated the land and never sent the officers to protect it. And so the men and women who carry badges on federal land have spent a generation covering territory the size of small states, without backup, without enough colleagues to investigate a murder and still answer a poaching call.
Making America Unsafe
Then there’s the current Trump administration. Where previous administrations chose neglect, this one purposefully inflicts pain on the dwindling public servants who survive its onslaught of firings and “relocations.” Where previous administrations celebrated our natural heritage, this one sees land to be looted by their wealthy friends. And they do it all while wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming to back the blue.
This is the same administration whose supporters beat police officers with flagpoles on January 6th. Whose president called the convicted rioters 'hostages' and 'patriots' and pardoned them. Whose base crushed officers in doorways, sprayed them with bear mace, and sent more than 140 of them to the hospital — and then had the gall to stand behind a podium a year later and call themselves the party of law enforcement.
“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 to put them in trauma.”
Those are the words of Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought. The man who now writes the budget that funds, or defunds, every federal law enforcement officer on public land. The man who’s already eliminated a quarter of Forest Service and National Park Service Staff since taking office.
Last month, the administration submitted a budget that would cut Forest Service operations by 44 percent. It would eliminate funding for Forest Service research entirely, with explicit instructions to 'terminate research programs and close research stations.' The one line item that went up? Timber sales — quadrupled from $39 million to $175 million. Senator Heinrich (D-NM) looked at the proposal and called it what it is: 'a roadmap on how to dismantle the Forest Service.'
Meanwhile, the administration has opened 58 million acres of roadless national forest to industrial development. It’s proposing to drill next to Chaco Canyon. It’s encouraging the transfer of federal lands to states that have neither the budgets nor the intention to patrol them. More land to exploit. Fewer people to protect it. And the officers who remain weren’t given the option to leave — they watched their colleagues walk out the door while they stayed behind, covering the same impossible territory with even less help.
This is what backing the blue looks like in practice: an officer driving a forest road alone at night, in a jurisdiction the size of a small state, knowing that the administration celebrating law enforcement this week is the same one that pardoned the people who beat cops with flagpoles, that hired a budget director who promised to put public servants 'in trauma,' and that just submitted a budget to eliminate the tools and the colleagues that officer depends on to survive. Somewhere around six hundred people stand between your national forests and whatever happens in the dark. This administration has decided that's still too many.
Still Out There
Last week was National Police Week. The President signed the proclamation. The social media posts went up. The flags were lowered. And somewhere on a national forest I won't name, an officer I met years ago is probably still out there.
I can still picture him, coffee in hand, leaning over a half-gone birthday cake for a colleague, telling me something he felt like nobody knew or cared to know. He’s probably still out there. Five hundred square miles. Just him.
I think about that conversation differently now. At the time, I was stunned by the number. Now I'm stunned that he stayed. He knew what the job was. He knew that if something went wrong on one of those forest roads, nobody was coming. He knew that a single serious crime would bury him for weeks and leave every other call on those 500 square miles unanswered. He knew all of that, and he put the badge on anyway, because he believed the land was worth protecting even if the people who run the country couldn't be bothered to help him do it.
There are 650 people (or less) like him scattered across 300,000 square miles of American forest. There are roughly 1,150 more in the national parks and fewer than 400 on the wildlife refuges. They are the thinnest blue line in America, and nobody in Washington — not this president, not this Congress, not the last one or the one before that — has had the decency to reinforce them.
I promised myself when I started digging into this that I'd get that officer's story out of the building where he told it to me. That I'd make sure somebody heard it. So here it is. This is what he was carrying. This is what they're all carrying. And until the country decides that protecting public land means protecting the people who patrol it, they'll keep carrying it alone.
What You Can Do
Use our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard to see how your representatives vote on public lands issues. Then contact them and tell them you want mandatory public lands law enforcement staffing minimums written into the next appropriations bill. Not aspirational targets. Not language asking agencies to maintain whatever levels they see fit. Floors. Minimums. Numbers that can't be ignored.
Call your representative and your senators at 202-224-3121.
Here’s what to demand:
U.S. Forest Service: Tell your representative to include language in the next Interior and Environment appropriations bill requiring the Forest Service to hire to a mandatory floor of 1,000 law enforcement officers, up from roughly 650 today, with benchmarks: 800 by the end of the first fiscal year, 1,000 by the end of the second. Require quarterly reporting to Congress on hiring progress. Include a prohibition on reducing the force below that number through attrition, reorganization, or any other mechanism. Congress sets mandatory end-strength requirements for the Border Patrol through appropriations every year. There’s no reason they can’t do it for the people who patrol your national forests.
National Park Service: Tell your representative to mandate a floor of 2,000 commissioned law enforcement rangers — roughly what the agency had in 2001 before the collapse began. Demand the restoration of seasonal law enforcement positions, which cratered from 825 in 2010 to 43 in 2023. And require the agency to publish staffing numbers for every park unit annually so the public can see where the gaps are.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: The International Association of Chiefs of Police said the refuge system needed 845 officers. The agency has fewer than 400. Tell your representative to write 845 into the appropriations bill as a binding floor the agency is legally required to maintain.
Across all three agencies: Demand that Congress require comprehensive, centralized crime reporting on federal lands. Right now, neither the Forest Service nor the Park Service tracks what crimes are actually happening on your land. You can’t fix what you refuse to count.
Our reporting is forcing the Trump administration to respond and shining a light on issues they want buried. We need help to keep this work up. Our paid subscribers are that help. They allow us to keep going. We hope you’ll consider joining us.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
-Jim
I read today that more Americans will be visiting National Parks this summer, since they can't afford more extravagant travel. The situation may possibly get more coverage, but I hope it won't take a catastrophe to open people's eyes. I fear it will.
Thank you. I suspect very few people are aware of this dire situation