A new ruling from the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with firing thousands of workers across federal agencies. The ruling doesn't address whether the firings are legal, but it removed a stay from a lower court that temporarily delayed the firings.
Thousands of workers have left the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Forest Service, and other federal agencies in the past couple of months through an early retirement offered by the administration, or through layoffs and staff cuts.
The National Parks Service has seen a 24% reduction in permanent staff since January, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. The group, which advocates for national parks, also states that only 4,500 seasonal jobs of the 8,000 pledged by the administration have been filled.
The group specifically pointed to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Montrose County, Colorado, which it said has been unable to fill 24 of its 74 staffing positions — a one-third reduction in staffing. The NPCA also said all of the park's custodial staff had been terminated, forcing remaining employees to take on extra work.
The Trump administration's rhetoric regarding federal layoffs has been focused on cutting red tape and bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., with a stated goal of keeping "boots on the ground" workers in place on public lands themselves.
However, Kate Groetzinger, with the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said examples like Black Canyon of the Gunnison prove that to be false and devalue the work done by support staff.
"Firing and laying off the folks that support park staff remotely also impacts visitor experience, because then those rangers who are on the ground in the parks have to also do back-end work," she said. "They have to do paperwork. They can't just focus on their jobs."
Groetzinger also pointed to other activities happening on public lands, such as critical research on climate. Scientists and researchers were among the workers initially laid off by the Department of the Interior in February. Groetzinger said much of the research done by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Forest Service, the BLM, and others can't be instantly paused.
"They are just not going to have data for the years that these folks are not working these jobs," she said. "That could significantly impact our understanding of how climate change is impacting federal lands, endangered species and invasive species."
But perhaps more crucially, Groetzinger said, this decision will hurt the rural, Western towns that serve as gateways to federal public lands, like Moab, Utah and Jackson, Wyoming.
"It's a one-two punch for the West," she said. "It's going to impact recreation on public lands negatively, and it's also going to drain resources from western communities that depend on federal workers' incomes."
The ruling doesn't say whether the firings were legal, only that the administration can proceed.
However, Groetzinger said if a lower court rules the firings are illegal, SCOTUS's' decision will still make it harder to hire back workers at agencies that have already been gutted.
"If you've already fired everyone in the HR department, there is no one to hire them back," she said. "If they hollow out the federal agencies to such an extent that they're unable to hire workers back … it will have the same impact, which is harming our federal lands, (and) harming the land management agencies that protect these federal lands and serve outdoor recreators."
A coalition of workers' unions, nonprofits, and local governments that have sued the administration said these mass firings are an attempt to reorganize the federal government, which is illegal because these federal agencies were created by Congress.
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