How the Trump Budget Cuts Are Playing Out at Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Kevin Heatley, the former superintendent of Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.

You may be planning a national park visit this summer, but whether you’re camping in Yosemite or hiking in Shenandoah, you might notice that there’s fewer staff around. 

That’s because national parks are undergoing significant changes under the second Trump administration. There have been increased layoffs and budget cuts, stretching park employees thin to perform additional duties. 

Kevin Heatley has worked in leadership positions with the Bureau of Land Management. In January of this year, he took on the national park role of superintendent of Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. But he resigned after five months due to concerns about the physical and mental health of NPS employees as they scramble to do more work with fewer people. [Living on Earth reached out to the National Park Service for comment, but did not hear back before publication.]

PALOMA BELTRAN: Crater Lake was the fifth national park established in the U.S. What makes Crater Lake a must-visit destination for summer travelers? 

KEVIN HEATLEY: Crater Lake is iconic. It was formed about 7,000 years ago by an explosion of Mount Mazama and then the collapse into a crater that subsequently filled with water. It’s one of the deepest lakes in the world, and one of the clearest lakes in the world. It’s just awe-inspiring. It’s a sacred location to the Indigenous people, the Klamath tribes, and rightly so. So it’s a place of spiritual and cultural significance that is inspiring. No one goes to Crater Lake and doesn’t have their jaw drop, so it’s strongly recommended that every thoughtful American citizen put it on their bucket list. 

BELTRAN: You resigned from your position as superintendent at the end of May, after just five months at Crater Lake. Tell me more about why you made that decision. 

HEATLEY: Resigning from the superintendent position in an iconic location like Crater Lake is not a decision that is taken lightly. It’s something that I agonized about. But in general, since the administration took over on January 20, they have been actively engaged in dismantling the National Park System and undermining the ability of these parks to function. 

Prior to the current administration, Crater Lake was already down 40 percent in permanent staff, and now, according to the internal data that was accessed by the National Parks Conservation Association, national parks across the board have seen about a 24 percent reduction in staffing since the current administration took over. 

I’ll give you an example: On February 14, we had what is euphemistically referred to as the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” where the probationary employees were all fired … The email that went to thousands of employees indicated that their performance did not warrant their continued employment, which was a completely fallacious statement. There was nothing behind that. They had no idea what this individual did, what their role was or what their performance was. It was ludicrous. 

I would speculate that the administration is just making a blanket approach to reduce the size of the workforce with no strategic understanding of how they can enhance efficiency. It’s that kind of decision-making that made it untenable to continue to work at Crater Lake, because Crater Lake will suffer significantly, and services and the resources will suffer if the administration continues to pursue this course of action.

BELTRAN: How has staff at the National Park Service been impacted by these federal decisions?

HEATLEY: The National Park Service personnel has been disrespected routinely. The instability with respect to the reduction in force—when is that going to happen? Who might get reduced? The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre … all this directly impacts the morale of the individuals employed by Crater Lake and the National Park Service at large. 

The other big issue is that we don’t know who was going to leave with respect to the buyout offers. So far, there have been three of them. And they came unsolicited. Emails came out to individuals that you can go on deferred resignation—“You’ll be on leave until the end of September”—then there was a buyout offer that came out if you left by the end of May. A lot of the key people, particularly at headquarters and regional, people that we’ve depended upon for support, they’re gone. They’re completely gone. They left, they retired earlier, or they went on to jobs in the private sector. It’s been very destabilizing, like, who would go to work for the federal government if this is the kind of reckless decision-making that is routinely being made? No one, no one that really wants to have a long-term career. 

BELTRAN: Crater Lake is dear to thousands, if not millions, of people. How is the visitor experience at Crater Lake being impacted by these decisions? 

HEATLEY: Crater Lake, from the standpoint of the general public, it’s not obvious that there’s any issues. We have staff routinely that were putting in 60 hours of overtime in a two-week pay period in order to assure that the work got done. 

A good example would be snow removal. Crater Lake is one of the snowiest places on the planet. It got over 36 feet of snow last year. They’re still plowing snow in the middle of July to open up some of the roads. So, snow removal is a major effort at Crater Lake. Well, how long do you think you can continue to have employees working 60 hours of overtime in a pay period? That’s not sustainable, and if one of those employees that knows how to operate those huge snow blowers and massive snow plows, if one of those individuals leaves, that’ll mean that some of these roads will not get the maintenance, particularly over the winter months, that we’ve had in the past and that visitors expect, and the buildup of ice and snow on the roads could be a direct hazard to the general public. 

That’s how tenuous, how unstable the operation is right now. Again, at this point, the general public that goes to Crater Lake, they most likely won’t experience any major changes, with the exception perhaps of the interpretive rangers. These are the rangers that do the campfire chats, that take you out and talk about the wildlife and the ecology and the lake and the geology, and these are the ones that educate the public. At one time, there were 16 to 18 each year. And at this point, Crater Lake is down to, I think it’s five.

BELTRAN: How is this attack on the Park Service also impacting scientists, researchers and historians who work behind the scenes to ensure the park is running smoothly?

HEATLEY: Oh, it’s a tremendous impact. It’s a tremendous impediment to getting the job done because they don’t have the support. 

To give you an example, Crater Lake has significant investment in monitoring and really devoted people that have made a career as fisheries biologists, as climatologists, as foresters and ecologists at the National Park Service. What did they prioritize, the administration, when it came to processing applications for seasonals? It was for people that were public-facing, the people that clean the restrooms, that run the fee booths. That’s all important services, but things like the biological monitors, those positions didn’t receive the same level of prioritization. 

What’s one of the best ways to avoid information that you find potentially could upset your economic interest? It’s, let’s just not collect the data. Let’s not collect the information, and then it doesn’t exist. And that’s problematic. This ostrich-in-the-sand idea that you can just stick your head in the ground and say oh, climate change isn’t real because we stopped collecting all the data.

BELTRAN: The Trump administration has also proposed transferring smaller, less visited national parks to the state level. What have you been hearing from the National Park Service community about this potential transfer?

HEATLEY: It’s apparent that the administration does not value the National Park System in the same way that the American public does. And those cultural parks, those smaller parks, they have an important story to tell. If those smaller parks were turned over to the states, they’re not going to have the resources to run them properly. Who knows what will be the eventual result if they were to do that? 

As far as the larger parks, and we’ve seen this from the administration in some of the language they’ve used, they don’t consider some of these cultural parks real parks. They think of the national parks as the Yosemites. Those are the parks that they consider the real parks. Yet they’re undermining those operations also. 

I would speculate, and I think there’s been a lot of discussion about this within the National Park Service, within the staff, that the ultimate goal is to see those parks privatized. They’ll stay within the federal government system, but they’ll be privatized as far as the management. That dismantlement of the National Park System, which has done such a phenomenal job for the last 100-plus years, is just unacceptable. 

To work for the National Park Service, most people that work there consider it an honor. It’s their dream job. The American public uniformly loves the National Park System and the National Park Service. Constantly, when we were there, and they realized we were under assault, we would get unsolicited letters and postcards continuously, trying to bolster the morale and giving us offers of support and help. People just, you know, they love these national parks. And because a park might be a smaller park unit does not make it less valuable to the system.

BELTRAN: You mentioned that these parks could be privatized, so I’m wondering, how might this shift affect environmental justice and equity, particularly for communities that have historically faced barriers to accessing public lands?

HEATLEY: Yeah, that is extremely problematic, and it’s really disappointing to see a lot of the really good efforts that have been undertaken at the federal government to address these historic injustices—to see them completely dismantled. And the efforts that have been made to, for instance, educate the public about some of the unfortunate, really dark elements of the history of the United States, that’s critical to the National Park System mission. Right now, we’re seeing that initiative that’s been undertaken as part of the executive order to “restore truth and sanity to American history.” 

The National Park System now, if you go there, they have those QR codes up on the displays, and you can scan the QR code and go to the site and put in a complaint because you don’t like that that park display described the historic injustices to the Indigenous population, or it describes the horrific conditions of slavery, or even something as recent as Stonewall. They’re sanitizing history, and that’s what would happen if it was privatized. Those things would not be part of the mission, would not be profit-generating, and would be deemphasized in order to make it palatable to as large an audience as possible. And that’s not the mission of the National Park Service.