On Monday, CBS Mornings Plus interviewed Emily Pennington, a writer, photographer, and advocate against President Trump’s recent cuts to the National Park Service (NPS), who lashed out at the Trump administration as "vindictive towards the national parks” and warned of the significant hit the parks would take in the coming month:
Right now, the National Park Service has about 16 percent fewer full-time employees than they did just a year ago, and 39 percent fewer seasonal employees, which are the backbone of the summer operations of the national parks when they get really busy and they need extra restroom cleaning, gate operators, people working in different food and beverage operations. So yeah, it's a really staggering time for the parks right now.
While layoffs may have an impact on national parks, the concerns raised by Pennington and others should be tempered.
Part of the difficulty of accurately assessing the situation was the lack of official information given about layoffs. The NPS had not provided an official count of employees let go at each park or what roles any former employees held. However, based on publicly crowdsourced information, the number of employees lost at each national park had been found.
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