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With national parks open but operating with skeleton staffing during the government shutdown, problems are emerging across the park system. The New York Times highlights video footage of BASE jumpers illegally jumping from Yosemite's El Capitan with apparent impunity, while others are taking advantage of the shutdown to take the permit-only cable hike up the back of Half Dome without permission.
At Pinnacles, California's newest and smallest national park, SFGate documented brown drinking water at campsites being used by middle school students in an outdoor education program. The campsite is operated by a third-party concessionaire, but the camp host explained that the water pipes weren't getting flushed because of the government shutdown.
Despite these documented incidents, the Trump administration claimed that law enforcement is fully staffed at Yosemite and the Park Service hadn't received any complaints about the drinking water at Pinnacles.
How many people will Doug Burgum actually fire?
Monday's court filing listing more than 2,000 jobs that the Trump administration plans to eliminate across the Interior department is "only a sliver" of Secretary Doug Burgum's actual reduction in force plan. The judge in the case required Interior to list positions in groups that contained members of unions that had joined the lawsuit; but at the time, several large employee unions had not signed on. Last night, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents around 160,000 government employees, asked to join the lawsuit along with two other unions. NTEU represents workers across the federal government, including at the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service.
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Is [BASE jumping] any more legal right now? No, not at all. They’re just less likely to get caught, or at least there’s that assumption.”
