On April 3, 2026, the Trump administration revealed its budget proposal for the 2027 fiscal year, which included the cut of over $736 million in funding from the National Park Service (NPS). If the proposal goes through, this will be the second major cut to NPS the president has made since he entered office last year, when he cut a record $1 billion from the agency’s budget. This drop in funding has led the agency to terminate 25 percent of its workforce.

In addition to these direct terminations, Bill Wade, the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, has observed the workforce being cut through other means. 

“There has been another incentivized resignation that was supposedly finished up in April that encouraged particularly people in the central offices, biologists, archeologists, historians, engineers, architects, those kinds of people that spent a lot of their time supporting parks [to resign],” Wade said. 

Incentivized resignations, also known as “buyouts,” are arrangements in which staff voluntarily resign from their positions in exchange for an agreed-upon compensation. The NPS has consistently utilized these “buyouts” to cut its spending without involuntarily terminating employees, which can create conflict and lower workplace morale. 

Wade predicts that these buyouts will exacerbate the decline in staff numbers seen after Trump’s initial cuts. 

“There’s a number of [park workers] that we know that went out in April, but we’ve not heard how many, some estimates would take that 25 percent reduction of permanent work staff now up to 33 or 34 percent,” Wade said. 

While these cuts are significant, members of the Trump Administration, like newly inaugurated Secretary of the

Interior Doug Burgum, argue that visitors’ experiences will remain unchanged. Wade believes that this is due to permanent workers being temporarily replaced. 

“The reason that [Burgum] can make that statement is that he’s authorizing parks to hire a significant number of temporary or seasonal employees during this coming summer,” Wade said.

 While visitors may not see an initial shift, the central offices of national parks are being reshaped behind the scenes.  Specialized inward-facing roles like historians, climatologists, and biologists see greater cuts than general, outward-facing positions like rangers or hospitality workers. Wade believes that the impacts of this will make themselves clear in the long term.

“If the people doing those research projects are lost, then the research comes to a halt,” Wade said. “And so in the long run, maybe years or decades down the road, I think that’s going to have a serious impact on the ability of park managers to manage their resources, because they relied on the data that was coming from those studies to make management decisions about how to manage the resources, both historical and natural.”

Marin County park ranger Matt Cerkel believes that despite initially staying behind the scenes, the impacts of this lack of research will make themselves clear to park visitors down the line. 

“There’s going to be more impacts on the resources those parks manage, be it cultural or natural, the visitors will eventually see those impacts, because you can’t hide that stuff forever,” Cerkel said.