President Trump on Monday put a freeze on federal government hiring, an action that could have wide-ranging impacts for the National Park Service as it moves to hire thousands of seasonal rangers and other employees for the upcoming summer.
Beyond seasonal positions, there are many vacancies involving permanent positions that parks are trying to fill. Then, too, there are personnel who have been offered permanent jobs but haven't begun working and are wondering how the hiring freeze will impact them.
At the National Parks Conservation Association, President and CEO Theresa Pierno said the hiring freeze would adversely affect the National Park System.
“Protecting our national parks requires the dedicated efforts of tens of thousands of rangers and other Park Service employees every day, but much of their staffs are edging closer to retirement. Parks already have 10 percent fewer rangers and other staff compared to a few years ago," said Theresa Pierno in a prepared statement. "They cannot continue to be hampered by low staffing, and that’s exactly what will happen with this hiring freeze.
"Park rangers are already forced to do more with less because they don’t have enough staff to handle record-breaking crowds. If Congress and the administration don’t work together to better staff our parks, this will only make it harder for those remaining park staff to care for and manage America’s favorite places.”
Traveler has reached out to Park Service officials for their interpretation of the scope of the hiring freeze and will update the story when possible.
Comments
One part of ending the climate change scam and disinfection of progressives from our government. Go Trump Go!
Kathryn, a few years ago I did research on foreign national parks. The goal was to find out what these foreign national parks charged their foreign visitors. Africa, Australia and others had different tiers of admission price. The foreign visitors were charged substantially more, the reason being if they had funds for an expensive trip to a national park, they had funds to pay an extra $100-$200 to get in. These extra fees are usually included in some tour groups. These additional admission fees help the parks fund their maintenance. I did this research when Yosemite was soliciting suggestions to look for ways to fund and improve visitor services/experience. I do not believe in banning foreign tourism . But I doubt a foreigner would cancel a trip because they have to pay a little more at the gate. BTW, NPS never responded.
Beachdump... I see you're still stuck in a state of delusions. By the way dumbdump, it's the 7th warmest january from global mean temps on record so far.
[To be clear, I'm not an NPS official. This is just one (my) view and gaming out from the trenches.]
There's now a little more guidance on the freeze, as the text of the memo was posted a day later: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/23/presidential-memo...
[Still no Office of Management & Budget website: whitehouse.gov/omb is a 404. And, in light of the hiring freeze, the placeholder doi.gov landing page about "15 amazing jobs" in Interior seems a cruel joke.]
Details are still sketchy at best. The DoD is seeking clarification on whether the exemption for "military personnel" only applies to the uniformed armed forces, or also civilian DoD employees. I haven't heard that DOI let alone NPS have received any communication whatsoever.
As for NPS, the plain text of the memo covers seasonal rangers. The memo requires that the head of OMB (not yet confirmed, Mick Mulvaney is the nominee but his hearings were about his goals of cutting Social Security & Medicare), in consultaton with the director of Office of Personnel Management (no nominee yet), recommend a long-term plan within 90 days, and that once that plan is implemented the blanket freeze expires. I don't expect a plan to be developed and implemented in less than those 90 days (and implementation can take time beyond that deadline). My guess is mid-April at the earliest for hiring seasonals or anyone, but it could well drag into the summer. The director of OPM can grant exemptions, as can the secretary of the department. I suspect that if it gets to crunch time, Ryan Zinke may exempt some summer seasonal rangers if not facilities staff.
My 3rd-hand understanding is that most parks already posted their seasonal positions in the last month or 2 (the usual lead time), and can proceed with all of the selection process, they just cannot make official job offers until the freeze expires. That would make the freeze only a minor disruption for summer-peak parks (harder on the potential employees who may have to give up and take other jobs), but still a problem for spring-peak parks like DEVA. I suspect that a couple of retirees that frequent this site have a much better understanding of the process than I do. And, this all may not be operative tomorrow or next week or next month, if further guidance comes from the Trump administration.
NPS federal employee FTEs are down substantially since 2003 (16404 in 2003 to 12440 in 2015, see http://bestplacestowork.org/BPTW/rankings/detail/IN10 ). [Bump in 2009/2010 due to temporary recover act shovel-ready projects.] The larger numbers in the 20000-24000 range are total employees, and count a 3-month seasonal as 1 employee instead of as 1/4 FTE. So the majority of NPS federal staff are less than full time 12 month, although slightly over half of all hours are by full time 12-month staff.
The decline is primarily due to the budget cuts and sequestration. Parks and programs simply don't have enough funding to pay for all of their authorized FTEs, so they may have 1 or 2 fewer interp rangers and facilities staff than authorized, and maybe add a couple more pay periods on unpaid leave for staff with 13-25pp appointments. In the absence of the freeze, there wouldn't be a hiring spree, there would be continued slow declines with strategies for positions that might be replaced by volunteers. [There's your $$ rather than FTE caps, EC.]
What the hiring freeze is doing, however, is preventing replacing (apparently even by promotions from within) vacancies in high-priority positions for operations, whatever the grade. The opposite example of Happy's above is just as bad. Consider a park where the chief of facilities and senior laborer in facilities both retired this year and can't be replaced (I know of 2 currently in this predicament). Even if a WS-5 laborer in facilities is a plumber and licensed electrician to handle the skilled stuff, he or she isn't trained to be able to handle the the budgeting, scheduling, contracting, etc., on the cyclic maintenance and FMSS and everything else that a chief of facilities is responsible for.
If the freeze doesn't last more than a couple of months, then parks might get by with a couple of 120 day details (temporary positions of current employees) to borrow the expertise from other parks to fill such gaps. The last few such details I've seen posted were different than in the past: they did not include 1 grade temporary promotion potential for lower-grade staff, and they had the benefitting park paying the detailees salary instead of the home park continuing to pay it. The latter is an inducement for a large park with a budget shortfall to loan out staff to recoup on the unspent or salary. Normally such details require the home park to continue paying the salary, so the benefit is experience and advancement for that individual, nothing directly to their home park. [Thus, details that help with future career promotions were only available to those with active career support from their park managers. I'm not a fan, but I'm not affected.]
President Trump's memo explicitly prohibits contracting out the work to get around the hiring freeze. I like that in general, as contractors often cost more than federal staff. However, not being able to hire summer field crews, and not being able to contract fieldwork out to universities via CESUs, means that natural resource programs that saved money by hiring grad students as summer temps each year rather than full time staff are in danger of having a 1 year gap in their long-term data or weed management. That decreases the value gained from the work last year and next year.
There may be a scramble for lower-grade staff with 13-25pp permanent positions in non-summer parks. They can have their unfunded pay periods picked up by other parks & programs to meet seasonal needs., and their home parks can reduce the planned number of pay periods they have to cover to help balance their budgets. But, there simply aren't very many such staff in parks that don't need all their hands in the summer, and this is about the worst time of the year for superintendents to do this scrambling for summer staff.
Finally, I heard that at least some parks and programs have been asked to start developing contingency plans for a 4% across the board budget cut.
No, I don't think that this is any way to run a railroad. But, it is what it is.
Oh, and NPS did not go on a hiring binge after the election. The HR bottleneck is such that positions can take a year or 2 for approval, and applicant pools can take 12-18+ months to get certified and released. Even positions vacant for 2-3 years that were advertized last July didn't quite get anyone hired before the freeze.
Oooooh - "ENTITLEMENTS". Makes it sound like a baby looking for a free lollipop.
Of course, the conservatives usually include things like my Social Security in it. Soicial Security is money I paid in. The only thing that made Social Security threaten insolvency was Bush funding his tax cuts and war by borrowing over a trillion bucks from the Social Security fund. My money which I am entitled to. I paid into it.
Coinservati es just hate doing anything which actually helps indivduals, especially when thos indivuals are due the benefit.
No, it is not an opinion, ecbuck, it is an actual fact based on studies of previous federal hiring freezes. It is true others have a different opinion, but it is just that, opinion not based on actual facts.
I've watched many hours of Senate hearings on cabinet nominees. I've heard a lot of dodging and skipping around pointed questions from one side and a lot of lavish praise from the other.
The more I see and hear, the more worried I become.
In hearings for Dr. Price for Health Secretary, there were many questions about cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Questions about those went completely unanswered. The only answer to questions about health insurance was, "It will be much better for the patients." No details of any kind.
Then, Mike Pompeo, now head of the CIA was asked in hearings if he would support waterboarding and other similar tactics. His answer then was an emphatic NO. But in response to written questions, he said he would certainly consider bringing it back. It was reported yesterday that people in the new administration and some in Congress are very upset because those answers were released to the press.
And there are the gag orders that have been slapped on several agencies.
Are we still in America?
(And, yes, I know this doesn't bear directly upon parks, but parks are only one small part of the country I love. We need to be aware of the threats facing us right now so we can at least try to do something about them.)
Rick, conservatives doen't hate helping people. They hate the federal government taking their money and spending it in ways that were not authorized by the Constitution and that don't actually "help" the people.