Illegally terminated park staff sound off on the damage done by the Trump Administration

Seven months ago, Kate Severson landed her dream job: Program Manager for Interpretation and Education at Voyageurs National Park.

Located at the wet and wild border between Minnesota and Ontario, Voyageurs is popular with canoe enthusiasts—the region was the domain of French fur traders centuries ago. There are also plenty of dry trails and overnight camping for everyone to enjoy.

Severson was a park ranger there. She led ranger-guided programs like boat tours and helped train volunteers. She also served as the liaison with local communities for which Voyageurs National Park is a critical economic lifeline.

This dream job ended for Severson on February 14, when she became one of the 1,000 National Park Service staff unlawfully terminated in a purported cost-savings move.

“I was fired by Elon Musk,” Severson told Public Parks. “Last July, I took the job in Minnesota, my home state, because I love the National Park Service and I love the northern woods.”

Severson kindly shared her story as she moves to regroup and look for other work. She’s an experienced state park manager, having supervised rangers at Pikes Peak in Colorado. She led fossil exploration hikes for Texas State Parks as a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department employee. She also helped control fire risk at Texas parks by assisting with prescribed burns.

Losing her and other highly skilled technicians and park service staff deals a devastating blow to a system that was already fragile.

“I want to share my story because I want to stop the attack on the hard-working Americans who work to protect our parks, our heritage, and our natural resources,” she said. “Our national parks are understaffed and this administration’s careless missteps, restrictions, and proposed actions will further threaten the very lands that belong to all Americans.”

Skilled at destruction

Elon Musk, a wealthy CEO, has been given a powerful government advisory role despite not being elected or confirmed by the Senate.

In normal circumstances, a person in Musk’s position would have no authority to terminate Severson’s job at NPS, but we are not in normal circumstances.

Musk contributed some $300 million to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. In return, Trump has given him broad authority to order blanket terminations of tens of thousands of federal workers. The agencies that hired these workers are going along with it, happily ceding their authority to Musk.

Many speculate that Musk is operating by the same basic playbook he used after acquiring the social media service Twitter.

After laying off some 80% of Twitter’s former staff, that service now suffers from massive reliability problems and has become riddled with fake accounts run by “bots” spamming users.

Twitter’s market value has plunged and the company is teetering by Musk’s own admission. A few days ago that service, now called X, was frequently down due to cyber attacks. Emarketer estimates that X has lost close to 7 million monthly users since the acquisition.

Last October, Fidelity estimated that the value of X (formerly Twitter) had collapsed by around 79% since Musk took over the company, from the $44 billion he spent to acquire it to about $9.4 billion today. The stock no longer trades publicly.

People commenting online fear that Musk is now delivering this type of “efficiency” to the federal government.

More lies, more pink slips

The Trump Administration has been lying about the reason for these mass firings.

In the emails Musk’s team has been sending to laid-off workers, federal employees are being told that they have failed their performance reviews or that their employment was no longer in the national interest.

In reality, the White House under Musk is arbitrarily dismissing anyone currently in their probationary period, even veteran federal employees who accepted promotions and were in probationary periods for their new higher-paying positions.

Several laid-off workers took to LinkedIn confirming the arbitrary and unjustified nature of their terminations.

Shelby Butz reached out to her network and beyond after she became one of 800 workers let go from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the same arbitrary manner as Severson.

“While I’m saddened by this sudden change in my career, I am and always will be passionate about protecting our world’s oceans and will remain dedicated to improving coastal communities,” Butz wrote.

Ryan Schroeder said he was let go from his job as a rangeland management specialist at the Bureau of Land Management after only 60 days on the job. Schroeder said the government and Musk’s team also lied to him about the reason he was let go.

“I was terminated for a ‘cause’ that is a lie,” he told his network. “I have gone to school and worked for 11 years to be qualified for this position, one of the most difficult positions to fill in public lands management agencies.”

Tracy Campbell worked with the Agricultural Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture. She said Musk and USDA informed her that she lost her job on February 13 “effective immediately.”

Campbell said one of her duties was to alert farmers to weather threats that could damage or destroy their crops. She also alerted farmers to fire risks and advised them on steps they could take to avoid having their fields burn down.

These farmers will no longer be receiving these warnings or other USDA help, at least not from Campbell.

Gutting USDA of new and veteran employees puts food and forests at risk. USDA is charged with managing America’s national forests and national grasslands.

“Agencies like USDA are losing both its pool of early career scientists as well as those with decades of civil service and research experience,” Campbell said. “By terminating our roles, the services we provide to farmers across the Midwest and beyond will be severely impacted.”

She and her laid-off colleagues were told the same lies as NPS and BLM staff. “One of my colleagues was so new, he didn’t even have a performance report.”

Molly Ryan announced on LinkedIn that she was let go from the US Forest Service, which is housed within USDA. She and her laid-off colleagues successfully passed all their most recent performance reviews, she said.

There is strong evidence that virtually everyone let go in the ongoing federal staffing purge was lied to.

“The termination letter claimed that my last performance review indicated that I had not performed up to standards,” said Josh Bendorf, a recently laid-off employee at USDA. “I wasn’t even on long enough to have had a performance review!”

Looking to the future; fearful for parks’ present

Ryan organized recreational opportunities for visitors to America’s national forests. Musk’s blanket termination action “affected new mothers on maternity leave, veterans, dual-fed families, and people young and old across the country who were dedicated to serving the public,” she said.

Many of the recently laid-off parks and public natural resources managers decided to speak up to find other employment opportunities.

Several of the nation’s state park systems are hiring, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and others. Visitations to state parks have been booming across the country, a consequence of America’s population increase and an echo from the pandemic years.

America’s national parks have also experienced record levels of attendance year after year. The system was strained beyond capacity even before the blanket, arbitrary staff terminations began to take hold.

This year, visitors to the national parks will notice the understaffing and all the problems that come with it. Facilities will likely be closed or in disrepair. Park visitors will probably have to wait in longer lines as fewer park staff process vehicles and day-use fees.

The unjustly terminated stewards of our natural heritage say they will not stay silent. Many are urging their colleagues and friends to give their representatives in Congress an earful.

Musk and Trump said the firings are necessary to balance the federal budget. At the same time, the Trump Administration is pushing federal lawmakers to enact sweeping tax cuts for top earners that will add trillions of dollars to the national debt over the long run.

Musk’s companies also continue to receive lucrative federal contracts, as Severson noted.

“Musk continues to take away American jobs and decimate the agencies that support the public,” she said.

She said that people all along the political spectrum should speak out against what’s happening to the nation’s public lands.“National parks are something all Americans, whether Republican or Democrat, take pride in and treasure,” she said. “I believe to make America great, our federal budget should support what makes us great: science, technology, the arts, our land, and our people.”