The problem is for sure much deeper: chronic underfunding meets up with a surge in demand. That is the story of the National Parks since 2020.

When I visited Glacier in 2019, rangers there told me the park was nearly at capacity. The parking lot at Logan Pass was full by 8am every day. They were hoping to convert Going To The Sun Road to bus-only, the way Zion did. But I took the bus one day and the wait was over an hour. Not enough buses and not enough drivers. And that was before the post-COVID surge in visitors.

Or institute a mandatory reservation system, the way RMNP did. I used the reservation system at RMNP in 2023 and it worked fine. But even with reservations, the parking lot at Bear Lake was full before 7:30am on weekdays. Yosemite had a reservation system last summer… they cancelled for this year. It takes more staff to run.

The operational capacity of NPS was already in the red in popular parks; reducing staff in a haphazard way right now is not a smart solution to the well-known problems the parks are facing. It’s one of many hints that the team up top might be more interested in saying “we did something!” than actually understanding and addressing challenges.

It will if they are at 150% of 2022 attendance (which they were in 2024).

They also froze hiring:

> ...thousands of employees in the process of onboarding for federal agencies, including the Park Service, received emails stating that their job offers had been rescinded.

So they will be entering the busy season with staff cutbacks, understandably dismal morale, and none of the people they were in the process of hiring. Want government to run like a business? That's one solid strategy for tanking a business.

It can be that they were already understaffed in 2022. You aren't making the pat argument you want to be making.

5% of total staff mostly frontline crew, could cause chaos. Especially if under staffed already.

Point me towards any company and order me to lay off 5% of individuals up to my own personal discretion and I guarantee you I can find a way to break it.

So basically you're arguing that no important hires were made in the past three years? That feels...unlikely.

Did you miss the part about hiring being frozen so that they cannot hire the several hundred seasonal workers that they would normally be hiring now to handle the summer load?

where did you get this from, i didnt see it in the article?

wait until ai staffing is rolled out.