Midwest communities worry firings will harm parks, economies

At the southern tip of Lake Michigan, an hour’s drive from Chicago, lies one of the country’s most biodiverse national parks. Shoreline birds build their homes along the coastal habitat. Prairie grass, woodlands and wetlands reminiscent of the Everglades fringe the trails that lace through Indiana Dunes National Park.

Each year millions of people marvel at this pocket of natural beauty sandwiched between a stretch of steel plants — almost 3 million visitors generated $206 million in revenue for local communities in 2023 — but the efforts required to maintain the delicate balance of such varied ecosystems often occur behind the scenes and are far from glamorous.

Eric Anderson managed wildfire risks and restored habitat through controlled burns in the 15,000-acre park, which relies on fire to thrive and sprawls close to urban residential areas.

“The people doing this kind of work tend to do this because they love it,” said Anderson, who left a higher-paying job in corporate consulting to pursue the National Park Service’s mission: to preserve natural resources for future generations.

Two weeks ago his role in that mission ended when he was fired alongside three others. They were among the 1,000 probationary park service staff members terminated as President Donald Trump’s administration freezes funding and slashes personnel across federal agencies. On Thursday, a federal judge in San Francisco found that the recent mass firings of probationary employees were likely unlawful, granting temporary relief to a coalition of labor unions and nonprofits that have sued the presidential administration over the cuts.

The future of protected natural spaces and the ability of these places to provide recreation and education became more precarious Wednesday after Trump ordered federal agencies to come up with plans to reduce permanent staff members by March 13.

“Since 2010, park staffing has gone down 20%, but park visitation has gone up 16% — so these park staff are resilient folks who have been doing more with less,” said Crystal Davis, Midwest senior regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan organization that advocates on behalf of the parks system. But the current changes are wide-reaching, she said, with a “devastating impact.”

Davis said dozens of people in 53 national parks across 11 states in the region have been fired, including at Pullman National Historical Park in Chicago. Areas managed by the U.S. Forest Service have also been affected; in Will County, a dozen staff members were fired at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie.

“The way that it’s happened, so fast and so furiously, it’s remarkable. It’s unprecedented. There’s law, policy and procedure in place that prohibits this type of thing from happening, so the fact that it is happening is very scary,” said Emilie Harvey, an education specialist at Midewin who was terminated Feb. 15. “It’s very important to me that people realize there’s human beings that are being fired, not just a faceless mass of people.”

In addition, more than 700 year-round Park Service employees have taken buyouts, according to a Wednesday Los Angeles Times report citing an internal email sent to supervisors last month.

Advocates say the timing of personnel changes at the parks — which besides resource managers include rangers as well as administrative and janitorial employees — will likely affect the public’s experience as warm weather approaches and visitor numbers climb.

That has already happened at Pullman.

A class field trip to the park had to be postponed after the ranger who helped coordinate it was fired, according to a teacher at Naperville North High School.

“I’ve been following the news that there were a great deal of cuts across the national parks and that the rangers were losing their jobs,” said Jack Wright, who teaches a class in Chicago history. “I just didn’t expect — and this could have been naive of me — to have it so swiftly and directly impact the students in my classroom.”

Trump has promoted the massive federal workforce overhaul as necessary to ensure efficiency.

“We’re cutting down the size of government. We have to,” Trump said during the first Cabinet meeting of his second term. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.”

A regional spokesperson said the National Park Service is implementing the president’s policies across the federal civilian workforce as the agency assesses its most critical staffing needs. “However, it is NPS policy not to comment on personnel matters,” the spokesperson said.