It’s the height of visitor season at Mammoth Cave National Park in southern Kentucky. Parking lots are full, and cars line the roadways. Visitors are clamoring for spots on underground tours of the longest cave system in the world.
Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has made cuts of roughly 24% to permanent staffing at the National Park Service, affecting parks all across the country, but on the historic tour through Mammoth Cave along with more than 100 other people, it could be hard to spot any change.
That’s because the cuts so far have largely affected maintenance, scientific research and emergency response services.
Republicans in Congress are now considering additional cuts of more than $400-million dollars to the budget of the Department of the Interior, the park service’s parent entity.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told a Senate committee last month that he thinks the parks service can have it both ways.
“I believe we can reduce what we spend in overhead in the parks and have more people actually working in the parks,” he said.
Meanwhile, national parks including Mammoth Cave are declining interviews to discuss staffing with reporters, or with park advocates.
“They’re not allowed to speak to us. And it’s been very difficult to find anybody off the record who will tell us the story. But we know what the facts are,” said Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
So far, Mammoth Cave National Park says its seasonal staffing levels are consistent with previous years. Per the same department policy, park employees said they are also unable to accommodate interviews on personnel matters.
“Mammoth Cave National Park remains committed to keeping the park open and accessible along with providing an excellent park experience for all visitors,” park officials said in a statement.
But Mammoth Cave visitor Mike Johnson from Asheville is skeptical. While on the walking tour, he told WKU Public Radio he’s worried about ongoing cuts to the park service.
“They’ve just been around for so long and it just seemed like, ‘Okay, yeah, cool that’s a national park, that’s not going anywhere,’ and now it’s like, ‘Wow, okay… things could change.”
Cuts to the National Park Service
The majority of the cuts came from Elon Musk’s DOGE orders during Trump’s first 100 days in office. The report from the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) used data from the Department of the Interior’s workforce database. Those cuts add to the existing 20% cut in park staffing since 2010.
That reduction in permanent staffing adds to months of turmoil over the status of seasonal and probationary employees at the national parks. Thousands of seasonal employees were fired early on in Trump’s term, and while some were rehired, staffing still lags behind the nearly 8,000 positions promised by the administration. Roughly 4,500 of those positions have been filled.
In early July, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court injunction that blocked an executive order for a large-scale reduction in force. NPCA representatives now say the initial 24% cuts are only the beginning of mass-firings across the park service.
Republicans in Congress are also considering additional cuts of more than $400-million to the budget of the Department of the Interior.
Francis, with the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, worked at the park service for more than 40 years, including as superintendent of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since his retirement, he’s continued as an advocate for the park service for more than 13 years. He says when budget and staffing cuts are made, they largely impact important behind-the-scenes work like rescue operations.
“When I worked in the Smokies we would have over 3,000 incidents a year. People would get lost, people would get injured, sometimes it takes 10 or 20 people to haul somebody out of the woods who has been injured or has had a heart attack. A lot of things go on behind the scenes,” Francis said.
A generational crisis
In his 40-year tenure with the park service, Francis was part of another reduction in force order in the 1990s, and temporarily lost his job in that mass layoff.
“That’s what’s going on now, but to a greater extent. This is the worst that I’ve seen in 53 years,” he said.
Francis says staff in park maintenance, emergency response, and scientific research are often the first positions to be eliminated. The Trump administration’s latest round of cuts reminds him of a previous reduction in force orders.
“I know that the maintenance staff was cut back some 20 or 30%. I know that because I was there, I saw it,” he said. “The same thing has to be happening today. I mean, there’s no secret funding. So if you cut the budget, you’re going to lose people. Period.”
Overworked and underfunded
Francis said the difficult part of measuring a nationwide impact to funding cuts is the lack of communication from the parks themselves. The coalition has to rely on historical data to figure out what’s happening behind the scenes. Since January, communication with the parks has been cut off. He worries the sudden lack of communication is due to further threats to the park service from the Trump administration.
When funding is cut, vital positions are lost, Francis said. However, when those positions are lost, the work still needs to be done, leading to overworked park rangers picking up the slack to maintain appearances for visitors.
Dr. Eboni Preston Goddard is the southeast regional director for NPCA. She’s been looking for local impacts to Mammoth Cave National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She agreed that park rangers and staff that interact most with visitors have filled the roles of lost colleagues.
“People can’t be doing programming because maybe they’re having to clear a trail or something happened, or they’re doing an evacuation and doing some emergency search and rescue or things like that, because things still happen in these places,” Goddard said.
A representative from the National Park Service declined an interview request and said in a statement it’s focused on meeting the needs of visitors.
“The National Park Service is focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks,” according to the statement.
The local impact
While Mammoth Cave officials say seasonal staffing is consistent at the park, Goddard said that as of February, at least 10 positions had been lost.
While preparing for the historic tour through Mammoth Cave, a ranger detailed an increase in ranger responses to medical evacuations out of the cave since January. He explained the process to visitors in a safety briefing.
“I can tell you from experience, folks, that medical evacuation out of the cave can, will, and has taken typically about six hours to carry out,” the ranger said.
Goddard said that due to cuts to funding, the resources needed for those rescues out of the cave are likely to be reduced. Across the region, at parks like Great Smoky Mountains National Park, she said it’s been difficult to get exact numbers, but they still see the impact.
“Across the region we’ve seen people that have taken those early buyouts or the retirements, so the park is certainly being impacted. And then just thinking about that, the staff that support these parks, aren’t solely located at those parks. So, from regional office staff to different departments, they also pour into those,” Goddard said.
It’s about the money
Congressional Republicans say the budget cuts to the park service are part of an effort to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse within the system. Goddard disagrees. She says every cent spent on the park service is worth the investment in visitor safety and local economies for the communities that surround national parks.
“The National Park Service represents one-fifteenth of one percent of the federal budget, so very very small actually. And then, what we’ve seen is that for every dollar invested in the national parks, we’ve seen at least 15 dollars returned within that local community,” Goddard said.
That local economic impact stands out for parks like Mammoth Cave, which has seen increasingly record breaking attendance in recent years, and the Smokies, which is the most visited national park in the country with more than 12 million parkgoers in 2024 — and an economic output of more than $3.4 billion in 2023.
With large, financially successful parks at risk, Goddard worries for smaller sites in Appalachia with less notoriety.
“So, we have Mammoth Cave. But right down the street is Camp Nelson, you know what I mean? I think about the Appalachian Trail for example. I’ve been to Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest more times than I can count, so just really important spaces, Pisgah right there in North Carolina too, just beautiful places that stand to be protected,” Goddard said. “If we aren’t even protecting these larger spaces, these cherished places that people know across the world, what does that look like for some of these smaller units?”
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky and NPR.
