Traveler's View | Will There Be A National Park Service Director?

If there ever was a need for a strong director of the National Park Service, now is the time.

Someone who not only would push back against some of the employee and program cuts the administration has been pursuing, but also someone who is respected enough by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum not to be fired for pushing back and by Congress so it might have their back.

During President Donald Trump's first term, from 2016-2020, he never had a Senate-confirmed Park Service director. While David Vela, a long-tenured Park Service manager, was nominated by Trump, that nomination never reached the Senate floor before that session of Congress ended. While Trump could have renominated Vela in 2019, he instead utliized a merry-go-around of acting directors, starting with Mike Reynolds, who had been a deputy director under Director Jonathan Jarvis during the Obama administration and continued as acting director when Trump took office in January 2017 and Jarvis retired.

Reynolds left the acting position in February 2018 when went to Yosemite National Park to serve as superintendent. Soon thereafter P. Daniel Smith, who in January 2018 came out of retirement (he had served in the Park Service under Director Fran Mainella) to serve as deputy Interior secretary, was assigned authority to act as Park Service director.

Smith stepped down in the fall of 2019 under curious circumstances that led Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility to charge that Smith was given a sweetheart deal to allow Vela to return as acting NPS director. The deal allowed Smith to live in North Carolina and work from there as the National Park Service Commemorations Specialist leading Park Service efforts on the 250th anniversary of the country's birth with office space at Guildford Courthouse National Military Park.

When Vela retired in 2020, Margaret Everson left her job as principal deputy director at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take on the acting position. That appointment led Timothy Whitehouse, PEER's executive director, to tell the Traveler that Everson "is part of a rotating cast of characters at the Department of the Interior that allow (Interior Secretary David) Bernhardt to maintain complete political control over the Park Service and reward those such as Everson who support using national parks as political props."

Everson was the fourth and final acting Park Service director during Trump's first term, giving the president the distinction of being the only president not to have a Senate-confirmed director since the job was elevated to require Senate approval.

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So far Trump seems comfortable with continuing that tradition, as he didn't waste much time to name Jessica Bowron, the Park Service's comptroller, to serve as acting director. Her term as acting director is set to expire at month's end, unless the president extends it. 

While the president already has had a U.S. Forest Service chief confirmed and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service nominee for director, yet to be filled are both the Park Service director and Bureau of Land Management director. While Kathleen Sgamma, president of a fossil fuels trade association that wants more fossil-fuel development on public lands, was nominated to lead the BLM, she abruptly withdrew her name last month. Days later a report surfaced that she had been "disgusted" by Trump's contention that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Cause and effect? Maybe.

A permanent Park Service director can't be nominated and confirmed soon enough. Not just to keep the agency from being further impacted by the Department of Government Efficiency, but to calm the nerves of a rattled Park Service workforce and to fight to see that the administration fails in its bid to jettison untold numbers of National Park System units and to financially bankrupt the agency.

Ideally, the individual would already be a well-respected Park Service manager, one dedicated to the National Park Service Organic's mandate that the agency "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." They would have the skills to reverse the flagging morale of the workforce, convince Burgum of the need to continue work on climate-change resiliency and migitation across the park system, and root out malignancies that fester in the form of all types of harassment.

It's not an easy job. Some would say there is no individual that could press that mission forward in the Trump administration, and that they'd have to be crazy to accept the nomination.

The only likely way the administration would nominate such a person is if they believed it was a political liability to destroy the National Park Service and its professional workforce. Hence, it’s urgent that people mobilize to make it abundantly clear to them that they’ll pay a severe price if they continue on this destructive path.