Anyone who’s managed a busy national park during a prolonged government shutdown has worried about the poop.
When Congress fails to fund the National Park Service and other federal agencies, the parks must close many of their buildings — even if the president decides to keep the gates open. So a lot of bathrooms remain locked or inaccessible, or get cleaned only occasionally by a skeleton staff.
Visitors understand park services will be limited. Yet nature still calls.
“There are toilet paper farms that pop up behind buildings,” recalled Jim Schaberl, the former head of natural and cultural resources at Shenandoah National Park, who worked through the government shutdown nearly seven years ago. “It’s very unsanitary when you have that volume of people. The back side of those buildings was a real mess to clean up.”
With the shutdown now in its second week, the Trump administration continues to keep the national parks open to visitors and campers, even though park system funding has lapsed. Trump made the same decision during his first presidency, opting not to close the parks when he caused a 35-day shutdown over border wall funding in 2018 and 2019. The policy is legally questionable and requires some accounting tricks to pull off.
The national parks are universally beloved by Democrats and Republicans alike, and they’re economically vital to the gateway communities along their edges. So it’s no surprise the open-gate policy gets bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and back home in the states that rely on them. Closing them would deliver a blow to the hotels and restaurants banking on a typical fall season, which, for some, is the busiest stretch of the year.
But those who’ve run national parks say the business-as-usual approach during shutdowns costs far more than it’s worth, and not just because of overflowing trash cans and toilets. The vast majority of park staff are furloughed, including rangers and maintenance employees, leaving sites vulnerable to vandalism and unintentional damage by visitors. The parks are poorly equipped to respond to emergencies, whether it’s lost backcountry hikers or downed trees blocking roads.
“Our primary obligation is to protect these places for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people. Half measures don’t do it.”
- Bob Krumenaker, former superintendent, Big Bend National Park
The policy can also impede a resolution to the funding impasse in Washington. The national parks are such a visible and positive face of the federal government that keeping them open — despite the risks and the law — gives lawmakers less urgency and probably makes a shutdown longer than it needs to be.
“If they don’t think it’s important enough to fund the National Park Service and other federal agencies, then by law they should not operate,” said Bob Krumenaker, who ran Big Bend National Park in Texas when federal funding lapsed in late 2018.
Most of the Big Bend staff live within the remote park and were on furlough at the time, Krumenaker recalled. He said the initial guidance was to keep the restrooms open, although staff were prohibited from cleaning them — a “crazy idea” — but he took the liberty of closing them once trash cans became half full. Campers continued to arrive even though the online reservation system was offline, spawning “mass confusion,” he recalled.
Worst of all, he said some visitors drove around barriers on backcountry roads and damaged fragile desert vegetation.
“Our primary obligation is to protect these places for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people,” Krumenaker said. “Half measures don’t do it.”
Asked if the administration is confident it can prevent damage this time, an Interior Department spokesperson said in an email that “critical functions that protect life, property, and public health will remain in place, including visitor access in many locations, law enforcement and emergency response.”
Tina Cappetta, who retired as superintendent of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park in Maryland and Washington, D.C., earlier this year, described the staffing as “bare bones” during a shutdown. The bulk of excepted employees still working are “understaffed law enforcement” who are forgoing paychecks until the funding fight is resolved.
“Things start to get away from you very quickly,” Cappetta said. “It just sets the parks up for so much resource damage, and you don’t come back from all of that.”
She added, “I don’t think we should bend over backwards to keep places like Zion [National Park] open. They should swing those gates closed.”
The Trump administration’s approach is a break with past practice. When Congress let funding lapse under former President Barack Obama in 2013, the park service closed whatever sites it could and even erected fencing around monuments on the National Mall. The shutdown ended up lasting more than two weeks.
Jonathan Jarvis, who was director of the National Park Service at the time, said it was his call. He chose to close the parks after consulting agency lawyers and concluding that doing so was the only move consistent with the agency’s founding law, which says the director “shall promote and regulate” the parks so as to leave them “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” He assumed they would be damaged if left open.
“The vast majority of government is invisible,” Jarvis said in an interview. “What’s different about the park service is it’s right in your face. So when you either shut it down or leave it open, either way, it’s highly visible. And that is a concern for the politics.”
House Republicans later hauled Jarvis before an oversight committee to publicly skewer him over the closures. He has no regrets. He said he closed off the Lincoln Memorial because he was worried it could get vandalized without supervision. Only 12 of around 300 staffers assigned to the Mall were not furloughed.
“I think to leave the parks open and to not have the staff there to ensure the parks are well managed and the restrooms are cleaned is a disaster,” he said. “It’s not a thought experiment. When they left them open during [the first Trump administration] there was damage, there was vandalism, there was people driving off road.”
The most high-profile damage during the 2018-2019 shutdown occurred at Joshua Tree National Park in California, where some rocks were covered in graffiti and some of the park’s namesake trees were even cut down. The park’s then-superintendent said at the time that parkgoers cut locks and chains off to access campgrounds.
“We’ve never seen this level of out-of-bounds camping,” he said. “Joshua trees were actually cut down in order to make new roads.”
Advocacy groups, including the Association of National Park Rangers, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Coalition to Protect National Parks, have all urged the administration to close the parks for the current shutdown. In the runup to the funding lapse, more than 35 former park superintendents signed a letter warning that the damage this time could be “much worse” than in previous shutdowns, since the agency is already hobbled by the Trump administration’s cuts.
“I think to leave the parks open and to not have the staff there to ensure the parks are well managed and the restrooms are cleaned is a disaster.”
- Jonathan Jarvis, former director of the National Park Service
The NPCA has estimated that 24% of the park service’s permanent staff has left in recent months through early resignations and other attrition, citing internal agency figures. Ed Stierli, the group’s mid-Atlantic regional director, said parks were already struggling to stay on top of basic maintenance and will see their backlogs grow as the shutdown drags on.
One of Stierli’s biggest concerns is the confusion around what visitors should expect right now. The agency’s social media accounts have gone quiet and the NPS website offers scant guidance. A red banner atop the site notes only that parks “remain as accessible as possible” though services may be “limited or unavailable.” There appears to be no information beyond a link to a bureaucratic, nine-page “contingency plan” PDF file.
“It’s just this total lack of clarity around what should be open and what should be closed,” Shierli said.
Like during the 2018-2019 shutdown, the Trump administration is using some accounting gimmicks to keep parks quasi-operational. According to the contingency plan, funds from park entrance fees will be used to support some operations, even though the Government Accountability Office found in 2019 that doing so violated the Antideficiency Act, which bars agencies from spending money Congress hasn’t authorized.
Funding parks through the shutdown with entrance fees comes at an ironic cost: The parks cannot collect new fees until Congress funds the government again, so visitors are waived through the gates for free. Due to the timing of this shutdown, the loss of fee revenue could deliver a big blow to sites that draw huge crowds for their fall foliage. Shaberl said Shenandoah sees around a quarter of its annual visits during October alone.
Meanwhile, some states and nonprofits have been stepping in with donations to help keep certain parks partially open, as they did during Trump’s first shutdown. Utah is using its own money to help fund visitor centers in five parks, including Zion and Bryce Canyon, while West Virginia is putting $98,000 toward running the parks at Harpers Ferry and New River Gorge for at least two weeks.
“These agreements allow visitor centers and other facilities to remain open and accessible to the public using state-provided funds until federal funding is restored,” the Interior Department spokesperson said.
The money may help keep bathrooms open and stocked with toilet paper, but those who’ve run parks aren’t entirely comfortable with the donations. Krumenaker said they tend to paper over the gravity of a shutdown, creating the impression that “things are OK and normal,” even though almost none of the critical behind-the-scenes work is getting done in national parks.
They can also further the notion — one clearly held by the Trump administration — that many park employees aren’t needed.
“It feeds this narrative that the agency is bloated and isn’t necessary, that states can run them and it’s all about visitors,” Krumenaker said. “And there’s no attention paid to the preservation of natural and cultural resources.”