Op-Ed | Park Service Pick: Diversity And Competence

Op-Ed | Park Service Pick: Diversity and Competence

By Jeff Ruch, Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility

President Biden’s choice of Charles (Chuck) Sams to lead the National Park Service continued his track record of diversity in appointments.  Thankfully, this choice looked past the small pool of National Park Service careerists who offered far more conventional candidates.

Unfortunately, beyond the historic significance of being the first Native American NPS director, nothing in Mr. Sams’ background has any direct relevance to park management.  Nor does he have any apparent experience running a large national bureaucracy like NPS with more than 12,000 employees posted across more than 420 national park units.

Moreover, if he takes office, he will not find a deep bench he can draw upon for advice. Today’s thinned-out, dispirited NPS headquarters has little handle on its deeply decentralized system, where park superintendents are called on to make policy choices with little guidance and even less support from a depleted “HQ.”

As an agency, NPS is in desperate need of strong national leadership, not merely due to the five-year absence of a confirmed director.  Currently, NPS is facing unprecedented challenges aggravated by radical climate change, a global extinction crisis, and a pandemic. At the same time, NPS is confronted with the need to make critical system-wide choices to address –

• Overcrowding and Lack of Park Planning.  Some major national parks are indeed being loved to death.  Attendance records are being set in the face of COVID even with the almost total lack of international travel.  Individual parks are grappling with this inundation with no firm guidance for how to establish legally required carrying capacities or a national strategy, amidst the evaporation of park planning at all levels; 

• Wildlife and Resource Conflicts.  From sea turtles to tule elk, national parks are grappling with conflicts and, in some cases litigation, about harm to wildlife from competing interests or, in the case of Padre Island’s Sea Turtle Science and Recovery program, bureaucratic hostility. Systemwide, NPS is confronted with the need to make firm choices on everything from tourist overflights to e-bikes and dune buggies;  

• Reinvestment. The Great American Outdoors Act provides NPS the means to both address its swelling infrastructure backlog and long-deferred land acquisition needs. Besides guiding these investments, NPS will have to rebuild its own staff infrastructure, with a workforce that has shrunk by one-third over the past decade even as its workload and number of units has grown.  It is no wonder that in the latest Best Places to Work in Federal Government Survey, NPS employee morale ranked 353rd of 411 agencies. National Park Service | Best Places to Work in the Federal Government

Into all of this walks Mr. Sams with no park management track record or announced views on the issues.  He enters a Senate confirmation process that today is more geared to elicit nominee evasion than revelation. 

The growing call from the Senate for confirmed NPS leadership will likely allow Mr. Sams to coast to approval by coyly deflecting efforts to learn his real views on specific pressing concerns.  If confirmed, however, this cushion of coyness will end.  He will have to make decisions. 

To aid in those decisions, he will need to quickly assemble a new leadership team. Inside a hidebound bureaucracy like the NPS, inexperienced outsiders can be easily manipulated by wily insiders. Fortunately, there is no shortage of disillusioned veteran managers and superintendents who left the Park Service thinking that it could and should do better. Mr. Sams will need savvy hands who have demonstrated their willingness to put their conscience over their careers.

These decisions will also be easier to make if they are based in some underlying philosophy for what furthers the National Park System’s mission in these changing times. It is what President HW Bush called “the vision thing.” If Mr. Sams lacks the vision thing, then his tenure will pass unremarkably. The National Park System will continue to muddle along for another few years into its second century of existence.

On the other hand, as an outsider, Mr. Sams has the opportunity to be transformational Park Service leader. Our National Park System’s conservation mandate hangs in the balance.