They supposedly backed off on some of the park cuts after stories like this one came out. It's not clear yet if they did anything other than lie about that, though.
I know they're National parks, but I wonder if state intervention would make sense. If California hired a bunch of people and sent them over there, would the NPS staff there object at this point?
Several random thoughts about it...
1. Selfishly, I'm glad I got to go to Yosemite 5+ years ago and at least see the essentials.
2. It's in a blue state, so of course, Republicans don't care. The best-known national parks in a red state are probably Yellowstone and Big Bend, and those states are likewise unlikely to flip in the Electoral College or Congress. I'm kind of curious about how parks in purple states are doing. What's the most important one, Gettysburg? A historic/battle thing is very different from a nature preserve.
3. Since it is in a blue state, I wonder what California can/would do. Contra 2, anything as positive as seamlessly providing more staff to the NPS probably can't happen, but they could probably do some stuff to reduce the harm. Can they close the roads leading to it? Make certain bad conduct against state law? Probably not, but you never know. This could get adversarial.
4. If it meant that the park was shutting down for the duration, I wouldn't even mind too much. Obviously it would suck for the people who were trying to visit right now and the local businesses that depend on them, but it would be harmless compared to lots of other things going on right now and might even do some good, giving nature a respite. Of course, that's not what'll happen; reduced staffing just means the same number of guests with less oversight, which means more people figuratively and literally shitting on the walls.
5. I briefly enjoy the thought of bears eating the wall-shitters until I humorlessly remember that bears who do that get killed later. I can at least enjoy the thought of more people like that falling into the hot springs at Yellowstone.
6. The big picture is even worse. There's a good chance that this kind of damage is irreversible. Sorry to end on a sad note...
Pennsylvania has a regular national forest with no history hardly at all.
I wouldn't get too focused on Yosemite and blue state/red state parochialism, it looks like the cuts are across the country. A more recent story. But it might turn out that, say, southern Civil War battlefield parks get extra staff wearing gray uniforms.
The workforce structure of the land management agencies makes the impacts of these firings particularly severe, especially if they also included seasonal workers. States don't have any kind of jurisdiction within the parks so there's not much they can do to mitigate it, unfortunately.
Great Smokey is half in North Carolina. Shenandoah is in Virginia. That's a lot of real estate in two purple states.
Last year I spent two days in Monongahela National Forest (West Virginia) and never saw a federal employee. Or a bathroom.
Not that I was expecting one. I was in a wilderness area.
There are hundreds of NPS units; every state has at least one. The impacts of this go well beyond the handful of big-name parks, though they are particularly severe there.
In the kinds of political systems the American Right prefers, the interior ministry is often where you find the secret police.
The long term game is to sell off the parks to billionaires, yeah?
Acadia National Park is in that congressional district in Maine that gave its electoral vote to Trump.
Forest Service, not Park Service, but here's a person whose position was funded by the state, not the feds, and still got fired.
https://bsky.app/profile/murray.senate.gov/post/3liuhxyoimc2d
14. And Acadia will just revert to the Rockefeller family!
6: The freedom trail is an historic park. The visitors center in Faneuil Hall is operated by the Park Service, but there's a lot of private property. I supposed that if you got stabbed standing on the red line and fell over on the sidewalk, the Commonwealth could prosecute the battery.
6: "States don't have any kind of jurisdiction within the parks"
I mean, States have as much jurisdiction as the Federal government will stop them from taking. I am thinking that states should be doing things that under normal circumstances would be hugely problematic, like literally sending in their own staff.
I agree. Observing the old norms is just time and effort wasted.
No state park system has enough excess capacity to take over operations of a major national park, even if it were legal, which it isn't. There's a vast difference in scale between these systems, even in a state like California. What they could do is close all the roads going on, but that's sure going to piss of a lot of people.
Texas ran its own border patrol missions with the Texas National Guard while Biden was president. It's maybe not the best example.
The unfortunate truth is that when the federal government does something it's usually because states have tried and failed to do it themselves.
National Parks are actually a bit of an exception to that; the federal government came up with the concept first and the states copied it. There it's really more of a capacity issue.
That's Adirondack Park erasure!
I don't know the details but during some government shutdowns Utah paid for the parks to have staff to stay open. Having five national parks means that a lot of money is in tourism.
Interesting! Apparently the federal government gives states the option of funding parks some other way during (formal) shutdowns.