"Charles F. Sams III, former director of the park service, says cutting nearly a quarter of the agency’s staff decimated institutional knowledge in a way that can’t easily be righted, and threatens to break the emotional bonds Americans have with public lands."
"PENDLETON, Ore.—With the second coming of Donald J. Trump, the first Native American director of the National Park Service packed up his belongings in Washington, D.C., and retreated here to the sagebrush outback of eastern Oregon.
Charles F. Sams III, whose Native name is Mocking Bird with Big Heart and who spent three and a half years in the Biden administration managing 85 million acres of public land, now lives in a modest suburban house not far from the Consolidated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation where he grew up.
From his subdivision with a view of Oregon’s Blue Mountains, Sams has had more than a year to watch, mourn and reflect upon what he and many other experts view as an annus horribilis for America’s national parks under Trump 2.0.
It began with a blitzkrieg of mass firings, buyouts and forced retirements. Within six months, 24 percent of the park system’s permanent staff, about 4,000 people, was gone, according to internal data analyzed by the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. Public workforce data released by the federal government in January shows a one-year reduction of 16 percent, or 3,076 people.
Gone were 100 park superintendents, as well as legions of biologists, archeologists, climate specialists and other scientists and managers who monitored the health of the parks, planned for their future and accounted for most of the agency’s in-house human expertise."
Blaine Harden reports for Inside Climate News January 27, 2026.
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