Sweeping job cuts at national parks across the country now include about 20 staffers in South Florida’s beloved swampy wilderness.
Rangers tracking the National Park Service layoffs ordered by the Trump administration say the cuts include staff at Everglades and Dry Tortugas national parks, Biscayne National Park, the Big Cypress National Preserve and the South Florida Natural Resources Center. Cuts include scientists doing critical Everglades research and rangers working on education programs for local schools.
”This wasn't a surgical kind of thing,” said former ranger Gary Bremen, who retired after 36 years with the park service and has been tallying terminations. “This was a scattershot kind of thing.”
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A local park spokesperson referred questions about the cuts to the Park Service’s Washington headquarters. The office did not respond to two requests for comment.
The layoffs could leave already small teams strapped during the busy winter season that draws tourists from around the world and at a time when South Florida parks face increasing impacts from climate change. Across the country, the cuts could lead to shortened hours or even closures, said Rick Mossman, president of the Association of National Park Rangers.
"These actions will hurt visitors and the parks they travelled to see across the United States,” he said in a statement. “If a visitor suffers a medical emergency while hiking in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, ranger response could be delayed."
The cuts also come at a time when the Service continues to struggle with a massive maintenance backlog that has swelled to $23 billion.
“These are often folks that are very new in their careers. They are new and enthusiastic and vital. These are often education jobs. There are maintenance positions.” Former park ranger Gary BremenFormer park ranger Gary Bremen
After weeks of speculation, the sudden termination notices have left staffers shocked and saddened.
At the research center at Everglades National Park, one of handful of such centers around the country, half the team working on Everglades restoration efforts is leaving, two sources said. Three staffers were cut and three took early retirement, they said.
"We're worried about them going in and deleting everything," said one scientists who is leaving and worries that valuable information will be lost.
The cuts come at a critical time for the center, with Everglades restoration work speeding up under record spending. Among the center's missions is to ensure that changes outside the park don't harm the wildlife and sawgrasses marshes, seagrass meadows and other habitat inside the park.
Over the last few years, the team at the resource center has been especially busy after Congress authorized $1.8 billion in 2021 for restoration under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. It shifted or created 13 positions just to keep up with the heavy workload. Scientists at the center also work on two other increasingly thorny problems for South Florida parks: invasive species and impacts from climate change.
Termination letter on Valentine's Day
At one of the national parks, a staffer who said she'd been assured her position was safe, discovered a termination letter sent after hours on Valentine's Day when notices went out around the country before the President’s Day holiday. The notice was buried in a generic email as one of four attachments, she said.
The staffer had moved across the country for the South Florida job less than a year ago, after completing a lengthy application process for what she hoped would be her dream job working with students. To take the job, she said she’d sacrificed her savings since the pay barely covered her rent.
Like others, she worries termination letters are worded to prevent workers from filing for unemployment benefits or jeopardize retirement funds.
The four-page termination letter said she was under-performing and not demonstrating the fitness required to meet her department’s needs, even though, she said, she had received glowing marks in her last performance evaluation.
Bremen said several of the layoffs included younger staffers.
“These are often folks that are very new in their careers,” he said. “They are new and enthusiastic and vital. These are often education jobs. There are maintenance positions.”
The layoffs have left other staffers shaken, he said.
“ People are frightened," Bremen said. "You don't go into the National Park Service to make a million dollars, right? The old adage is we get paid in sunsets.”
For many, he said, working for the park service is a calling, not a job.
“ I can rattle off names of kids who've gone into fields related to parks and whatnot that I met when they were four or five years old. I still keep in touch with them. I go to weddings. I've been invited to school plays, I've gone to a funeral,” he said. “And that's not just me. That's rangers all across the country that are part of people's lives and making a difference and that's one of the many things that's being lost.”
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