Adam Auerbach used his AmeriCorps experience to become a park ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park/Courtesy of the author

Have you ever asked a national park ranger their origin story? Let me tell you mine. My journey, like that of so many other rangers, started with AmeriCorps, the impactful program that provides young people with service opportunities, now under attack by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

In 2013, I was 20 and lacking direction. I had done two years of college, but had not found my path. And so I joined an AmeriCorps program, the Nevada Conservation Corps, and was transformed. Alongside a team of eager young people, I served my country⸺backbreaking work, running chainsaws to carry out wildfire fuels mitigation projects on public lands. I remember vividly the vibration of the saw in my hands, the curious scent of gasoline and juniper intertwined, the juxtaposition of sun and the cold of desert night, the way my body felt after each eight-day hitch of hard labor, sans shower, living in our tents. Relationships and a commitment to public service forged under the expanse of Nevada sky.

And it turns out I did not fall in love with running a chainsaw in the desert ten hours a day. But I did fall in love with the idea of working on and on behalf of our public lands. AmeriCorps gave me a newfound sense of direction, and I followed it. I transferred colleges, got my degree in environmental studies, and soon became a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, an outcome only possible due to the experience and mentorship I gained as an AmeriCorps member. At Rocky I spent three glorious seasons serving you, the American public, primarily staffing visitor centers and delivering ranger programs.  

AmeriCorps staff work in all kinds of weather/Adam Auerbach

This is my story, but it is also the quintessential ranger story. AmeriCorps service is a most common path into the National Park Service. I would know; I have also served as a crew leader for AmeriCorps programming and as staff with a national nonprofit managing individual placement of AmeriCorps positions in support of federal public lands agencies. And in so doing, I have supported and mentored hundreds of young people who have also had their lives transformed for the better by AmeriCorps service, many of whom, like me, then went on to work for the Park Service and other federal public lands agencies.

If you have been following the news, you already know today’s park rangers are under attack in ways never before seen in the proud history of the Park Service. Probationary employees have been indiscriminately fired, purchase cards have been reduced to a ludicrous limit of $1, and underneath the ominous weight of promised “massive” reductions in force, thousands have been forced out through multiple rounds of buy-out programs within an already emaciated agency. Now, in moving to dismantle AmeriCorps, DOGE is broadening its assault on today’s rangers to also include tomorrow’s park stewards. If they succeed in dismantling AmeriCorps, we will face nothing short of a lost generation or park staff.

Sadly, the consequences of this most misguided action will also be felt today across our parks if DOGE is not stopped here. Many do not realize, but much of the boots on the ground work in national parks is completed by AmeriCorps members who support the skeleton crews of park staff that have been all too common for generations now. AmeriCorps members build and maintain trails, remove invasive species, support biological monitoring, and even augment visitor services across the Park Service. If you have visited national parks, you have benefitted from the work of AmeriCorps members. Take for example my former park, Rocky, where the Rocky Mountain Conservancy, the partnering nonprofit of the park, runs an impactful AmeriCorps conservation corps program. Conservation corps members and crew leaders carry out necessary projects that park staff alone simply would not be able complete. 

AmeriCorps field work builds skills and bonds camaraderie/Adam Auerbach

Ironically, park superintendents, in the wake of recent mass firings and resignations, were told to use “ingenuity” in keeping parks staffed and functional, and were thus encouraged to lean on volunteers and partner organizations. While volunteers and partner organizations are no replacement for staff, AmeriCorps partners are one of the best and most “ingenious” ways to leverage volunteership to support parks. 

But then again, this was never meant to make sense. AmeriCorps is a tremendously efficient use of federal dollars, as it leverages volunteer labor; AmeriCorps members only earn a small cost of living stipend. Beyond parks and public lands, AmeriCorps members nationwide support such worthy causes as disaster response, public health, education, food security, and much more. The AmeriCorps annual budget is a vanishingly small percentage of federal spending, and a recent study demonstrated that each $1 invested in AmeriCorps provides an unprecedented $17 return on investment back to the American people. Now that is efficiency.

So what is gutting AmeriCorps really about? AmeriCorps, like our national parks, brings people together across differences and reminds us of our shared kinship with each other and the earth, which is an affront to an administration that would rule us through division and plunder our public lands. AmeriCorps too is a pipeline for dedicated, professional, nonpartisan civil servants, a class of people the current administration is seeking to extinguish. Deeper than this still, AmeriCorps instills in young people a patriotic sense of service and a calling to support one’s fellow Americans, something DOGE’s hatchet merchants would know nothing about.

Please join me now in support of those young people who would serve today and staff our national parks tomorrow: call and email your representative and senators today, before it is too late. A call script is available here, and an easy form for emailing is available here. For AmeriCorps, like our national parks, is one of our country’s greatest ideas. And if we lose AmeriCorps, we will lose something fundamental not just to my story and being, but to the essence of our country: service to something higher than oneself.

Adam Auerbach is a conservation non-profit leader with a background in public lands management, partnership development, and collaborative conservation. He worked at Rocky Mountain National Park from June 2016 until October 2019.