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A rogue ranger is documenting every National Park Service firing

15 949
01.03.2025

FILE - A rogue ranger is documenting every National Park Service firing.

In an act of resistance, park rangers are banding together to crowdsource terminations and catalog the number of National Park Service employees the Trump administration has fired in every park unit across the country.

The rangers want the public to know how many people got fired on Feb. 14 in what’s being called the “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” says one seasonal park ranger who is leading the charge. The ranger requested anonymity to protect their job, which was granted in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy.

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“I essentially crowdsourced the information from hundreds, possibly thousands, of park rangers who chipped in for providing information on their own park,” they wrote in an email to SFGATE. “I have put in dozens of hours of my own time to accumulate this information within the past week,” the ranger added. “I truly believe this information should be seen by the general public.”

The ranger gathered the information from three groups of Park Service employees on social media and then double-checked with rangers at each site to validate the numbers.

It’s been widely reported that roughly 1,000 permanent Park Service employees in their “probationary” period were fired earlier this month. “Probationary” isn’t a measure of job performance; it refers to employees who are new hires in their first one or two years of employment or longer-term employees who recently transitioned to a new position. An estimated 4,700 more employees were terminated at other public land management agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, which includes the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

But numbers in individual national parks are hard to come by. Spokespeople for several national parks referred SFGATE’s questions about the rangers’ list and numbers of fired employees to the National Park Service Office of Communications. The office replied with a statement that didn’t answer any questions. “The National Park Service is hiring seasonal workers to continue enhancing the visitor........

© SFGate