• Ah, America’s national parks. Yellowstone! The majesty of Yosemite! If there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on, it’s that the United States boasts some pretty spectacular nature. Who doesn’t love a hike through the redwood forest and watching the sun set over some ancient canyons? (...Wait for it….)

• “First Buddy” Elon Musk, apparently. In recent weeks, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency fired some 1,000 National Park Service employees, just before the busy season. Another 700 accepted DOGE’s infamous fork-in-the-road offer to resign. The Trump administration is now allowing NPS to hire for open positions — but park leaders doubt there will be enough time to fill the spots before millions of people visit. I spoke with two National Park Service employees with knowledge of the DOGE impacts, which go way beyond layoffs.

• All National Park Service purchase cards across the country had their limits set to $1 this week, according to the employees and an email obtained by What A Day. There’s only one person with an active purchase card in the entire Intermountain Region — which serves about 90 areas managed by NPS from Arizona up to Montana. “Parks are quickly going to run out of cleaning supplies and toilet paper, let alone everything else required to operate a park,” one of the employees said. Parks can’t pay for phone service, internet for security cameras, or even new signage, the second employee said.

• In a virtual meeting last week, NPS workers criticized high-level staff for removing the word “transgender” from its Stonewall website, the second employee said. The Stonewall riot was a major turning point in the fight for LGBTQ rights, led by a transgender woman. But the Trump administration gave the staff a choice: “Change the language or shut down the whole website, so they opted to change the language,” the employee added.

• Some probationary staff who were fired include people doing legally required compliance work on a Grand Canyon project to replace an old pipeline that keeps breaking, the first employee said. It’s likely to delay the contractor’s work, the person added, which could cost the park an estimated $64,000 every day. The inefficiency doesn’t stop there! DOGE is planning to have electric vehicle chargers removed from at least one NPS center in Denver, even though it would be cheaper and more efficient to leave them there, the person added. 

• This will affect kids, too. Some offices are almost out of National Junior Booklets, educational pamphlets for young children — and they can’t buy more because of the $1 limit. “Our only option is to print via our printer until we run out of ink … so we’ll likely not have any Junior Ranger books on hand to give kids for the upcoming spring breaks,” the second employee said.

• The Trump administration is warning that more mass firings are coming. Park workers are bracing for devastating repercussions: Any number of firings “will cripple the parks” in terms of hosting tours, cleaning facilities, and maintaining trail, among other essential tasks, the first employee said. In Boston, many events planned to commemorate the United States’s 250th anniversary are now in flux.

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