Traveler's View | When Did The National Park Service Lose Its Voice?

The National Park System long has been a cherished government institution, namely due to its safeguarding of America's natural resource treasures and history, and it makes sense that news of the national parks is of keen interest to the public.

Getting answers from the leadership of the National Park Service to questions of public interest, however, has become more and more difficult, as the agency increasingly takes a no-comment approach to challenging, uncomfortable, or accountability issues.

The National Parks Traveler exists to represent the public in keeping track of how parks are being managed and how the Park Service is operating. But we have met with what appears to be indifference when simply seeking to get journalistic questions answered, with headquarters in Washington at times tightly controlling the ability of local park staff to respond when questioned by some reporters. Sadly, I can't recall a more difficult time for covering the National Park Service in my 40-plus years as a professional journalist.

The Traveler is the only journalistic organization, to my knowledge, that focuses its coverage entirely on the National Park System and the National Park Service. And we do it on a daily basis — which no doubt leads to more questions to the Park Service from our organization than from most news organizations. But the roadblocks that spring up are around seemingly minor questions as well as prickly issues.

Recent unanswered questions include those about the appointment of a superintendent whom the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General determined had “committed criminal violations by submitting false travel vouchers and by accepting more than $23,000 in meals, lodging, and other in-kind gifts from non-government organizations.”

The Park Service won’t touch how that might look to the rank-and-file staff, and that's concerning since the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey conducted by the Federal Office of Personnel Management in 2022 ranked the NPS 396th out of 432 government agencies on “the level of respect employees have for senior leaders.”

Also left hanging: Our questions stemming from reports on the growing attrition rate and low morale among NPS employees. In particular, what has NPS Director Chuck Sams — who called improving employee morale his top priority — been doing the past two years to reverse those trends?

Ivory Tower Syndrome?

Once upon a time, directors of the agency occasionally would hold conference calls with reporters who regularly covered the National Park Service and the National Park System. Those calls not only provided information, both on and off the record, but allowed reporters and the directors to develop a measure of rapport.

That's not to say things were warm and fuzzy, but the interactions at least bred some respect and mutual professional understanding.

Sams has not taken up that practice. As a result, we don't know his position on a wide range of issues, nor how he's been working to further the mission of the Park Service.

Those are subjects the American public deserves to know. And obtaining information from the National Park Service on how the parks are faring and being managed shouldn't require negotiating a maze, leaving reporters wondering if a response is coming, or being forced to resort to a Freedom of Information Act request just to learn information that rightfully belongs in the public domain.

Repeated requests by the National Parks Traveler to interview Sams have been turned down, at times with no reply at all. Perhaps that’s because the agency doesn't like all our inquiries or editorial positions — but that's not the point. Transparency on how our public lands are being managed is the point. By ignoring questions or simply declining to comment one can infer the agency has a disdain for the media, or at minimum a lack of appreciation for the public’s right to know what’s going on in its national parks and what is affecting their operations.

Certainly, there are topics that due to litigation won't be discussed, but those are few and far between when the entire realm is considered.

Understaffed And Underpaid

There are wonderful, hardworking public information/public affairs staff (and superintendents) across the system who strive to respond to the media, even answering phones or emails on weekends or fielding ridiculous questions — and I've asked a few.

But field staff — from Acadia to Zion and probably within Washington HQ — do not have the resources needed to keep the public, and the media, informed. Last time I checked, there are not enough public information officers — just 25-30 officially designated public affairs specialists across the 425 parks and Washington and regional offices — and they are not paid enough. Plus, superintendents often are faced with no-win choices on hiring when they have so many critical vacancies. If you never had a public information officer, you don’t miss that position as much as if you had a great one who left. 

On top of limited resources, the information flow suffers at the political level. Unlike local news organizations, the Traveler regularly sees questions it raises with park staff across the country sent first to Washington, either for clearance or just to let Washington know, and apparently to ensure that even correct answers don’t end up embarrassing the administration. 

Questions often have gone unanswered or taken weeks to respond to on issues ranging from climate change and oil drilling to how the Park Service is dealing with the Caneel Bay Resort grounds at Virgin Islands National Park, whether the Park Service can manage native elk alongside cattle at Point Reyes National Seashore, and even how $25 million would be spent on bison restoration. In the case of bison restoration funding, our request to discuss potential benefits of the $25 million with the Park Service’s chief of wildlife conservation was declined when the funding was announced. Some weeks later the information was released by the Interior Department.

In one recent case, it took about three weeks for Washington to give officials at the park level an OK to respond to questions about concessions, visitor-use management planning, and boat inspections.

Transparency?

The Obama administration did not always deliver the transparency it promised, and the Trump administration only made it worse. The Biden administration hasn't improved things.

The Biden administration from the first day said it would promote transparency. Then-press secretary Jen Psaki stated: "We have a common goal: which is sharing accurate information with the American people."

The National Park Service has yet to fully achieve that. And that's unfortunate, because information is a powerful tool in the Park Service communications and messaging arsenal. From information about ecology, sciences, landscapes, history,  and culture, to even breaking news, the agency has many wonderful stories to tell, about reclamation, protection, preservation, history, and discoveries. It has rich perspective from more than a century of managing the park system that is valuable in discussing management.

National parks have never been entirely immune from political influences, whether they came out of Washington, D.C., or from close to a park’s boundaries. There's evidence that the past 40-50 years have seen some of the most egregious political attempts to subvert the mission of the National Park Service to preserve and protect natural resources unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

• When he was vice president, Dick Cheney ensured the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park would stay open in winter, with the aid of bombing avalanche chutes, to benefit Wyoming tourism.
• Interior Secretary James Watt and Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks Bill Horn under the Reagan administration took a dim view of the National Park Service, opposing expansion of the park system and calling for an emphasis on visitor enjoyment over resource protection.
• Paul Hoffman as a deputy assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the administration of George W. Bush tried to reverse the management directives that the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 gave the Park Service.
• Coca Cola, which manufactures bottled water along with soda, raised concerns over plans to ban disposable water bottles at the Grand Canyon with then-Park Service Chief Jon Jarvis. He reportedly blocked the ban to collect more information on its impacts. Coca Cola officials approached both the agency directly and the National Park Foundation with its concerns, according to a report in the New York Times.
• And when President Trump came into office, DO100, which spells out the Park Service's scientific stewardship responsibilities, was quickly jettisoned.

Today the influencing has spread to the information front — it seems the administration has decided that instead of transparency, it will only provide information to the media when it’s convenient, regardless of the issue at hand. Proactive and frank conversations can be a boon for the agency. They might be uncomfortable at times, but they shouldn’t be ignored.