Helen Dhue landed her dream job in 2024, working as a guide at Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park in Texas, where she chatted with visitors and hosted field trips.
But when the 23-year-old landed in Dallas this month on a layover on her way home from a work trip in Arizona, she got a text message from her boss. She was fired.
“I was devastated,” Dhue said in a phone interview with The Dallas Morning News. “I was crying on the airplane. Everyone was trying to comfort me.”
Parks in Texas and across the country are bracing for disruptions following the dismissal of at least 1,000 National Park Service employees on Feb. 14, including Dhue. Park advocates warn long entry lines, shuttered visitor centers and uncollected garbage are likely in coming months. Some parks have already cut services.
In Texas, at least nine employees at national park sites lost their jobs, said Bill Wade, executive director of the nonprofit Association of National Park Rangers. Five from Big Bend National Park, two from Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in the Hill Country and two from Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park in Brownsville were fired.
Positions include maintenance workers and custodians, fee collectors who greeted visitors and passed out maps, and rangers who led group hikes and answered questions at welcome centers, Wade said.
The firings are part of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, run by billionaire businessman and entrepreneurElon Musk, which is seeking to dramatically cut the federal workforce. Firings have largely targeted the roughly 200,000 federal employees on probationary status, often because they started their positions within the past year.
Staffing woes extend beyond those employees, though. At least 3,000 additional people were fired from the U.S. Forest Service , which often works with the parks. The hiring of thousands of seasonal workers was delayed, but the U.S. Department of Interior, which oversees national parks, has approved up to 7,700 temporary positions, and parks are racing to fill those spots.
The move comes weeks before spring break, when visitors typically flood parks in Texas, including Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Neither park has announced operational changes, such as reduced hours or closed entrances.
“We are very worried about spring break, which is the high season for Texas,” said Cary Dupuy, Texas regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. “Visitors to the park should expect a different experience than usual.”
Both parks have seen an increase in visitors in recent years and long entry lines during peak weeks. From 2019 to 2023, the number of visitors jumped 10% at Big Bend and 20% at Guadalupe Mountains.
Some 325 million people visited the country’s 433 national parks, monuments and historic sites in 2023, according to park service data. More than 5 million visited Texas national park sites that year.
Even before the firings, the nation’s parks were critically understaffed, Wade said. Since 2011, the number of National Park Service employees dropped 15% to some 20,000 workers. During the same time, visitation grew 16%.
Big Bend, which normally has 90 full-time employees, is down an estimated 20%, Dupuy said. That was evident with long waits to enter the park over Presidents Day weekend.
Some parks have already scaled back. Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado announced it will close on Mondays and Tuesdays. In Arizona, Saguaro National Park visitor centers are closing on Mondays. Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico has canceled ranger-led tours, and Yosemite National Park paused reservations for coveted camping spots.
Park advocates say the firings threaten public safety, with fewer rangers at the park to help hikers. Punishing heat has led to numerous deaths, injuries and rescues at Texas parks in recent years.
“Our parks are really going having to make hard decisions,” Dupuy said. “How do they ensure public safety with fewer rangers?”
Neither the National Park Service or Department of Interior responded to requests for comment.
In an appearance at the White House this month, Musk defended DOGE’s work as “common sense” and “not draconian or radical.”
“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” he said. “That’s what democracy is all about.”
Some fired park workers have taken to social media in recent days to share their stories.
More than 230,000 people reshared a Facebook post by Brian Gibbs, an environmental educator at Effigy Mounds National Monumentin Iowa, who lost his job. Almost immediately after learning he was fired, Gibbs said he was locked out of his email and electronic personal file that contained professional records.
“Things are not ok,” he wrote. “I am not ok.”
On Facebook, Dhue said she was ecstatic to get a full-time job last year at Palo Alto Battlefield, which commemorates the first battle of the Mexican-American War, after working temporary stints at parks in Virginia, Mississippi and California.
“I am not going to lie, this is hard,” she wrote. “Along with losing my job, I have lost a lot of my identity.”
Dhue called the firings “an attack on our public lands” in a phone interview and said she is now trying to figure out her next job move while coming up with money to break her rental agreement in Brownsville.
“I went from being a working citizen and taxpayer to applying for unemployment,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
