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The new warehouse, at nearly 1 million square feet, is being built to suit for an unnamed tenant. Construction is planned to finish in spring 2026.

by Anjeanette Damon

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If you ask a National Park Service ranger how the Trump administration’s cost cutting will affect your next park visit, you might get talking points instead of a straight answer.

A series of emails sent late last month to front-line staff at parks across the country provided rangers with instructions on how to describe the highly publicized staff cuts. Park leaders further instructed staff to avoid the word “fired” and not blame closures on staffing levels.

On Feb. 14, at least 1,000 park service employees were terminated as part of broad reductions to the federal workforce by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. As a result, visitor centers have reduced hours, tours of popular attractions have been canceled, lines have spiraled, bathrooms may go uncleaned, habitat restoration has ceased and water has gone unchecked for toxic algae.

Meanwhile, rangers have been ordered to describe these cuts — or “attrition” and “workforce management actions,” according to the talking points — as “prioritizing fiscal responsibility” and “staffing to meet the evolving needs of our visitors.” They also should tell visitors the parks will continue to ensure “memorable and meaningful experiences for all.”

If asked about limited offerings, one park’s rangers were instructed to say “we are not able to address park or program-level impacts at this time.”

The guidance mirrors other measures instituted by the Trump administration to dictate how federal employees communicate with the public. This month, employees at the National Cancer Institute were told they needed approval for any communication dealing with 23 “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” issues, including peanut allergies and autism. Agencies across the federal government have begun compiling lists of words to avoid because they could conflict with Trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, The New York Times has reported.

The guidance handed down to park employees puts rangers in a particularly difficult position, said Emily Douce, deputy vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy organization for the parks. Rangers pride themselves on knowledge of their parks and their responsibility to accurately educate the public about the habitats, wildlife and geology of those special places.

“They shouldn’t be muzzled to not talk about the impacts of what these cuts mean,” Douce said. “If they are asked, they should be truthful on how federal dollars are being used or taken away.”

An NPS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that any assertion that park staff are being “silenced is flat-out wrong” and that talking points are a “basic tool” to “ensure consistent communication with the public.”

“The National Park Service is fully committed to responsible stewardship of our public lands and enhancing visitor experiences — we will not be distracted by sensationalized attacks designed to undermine that mission,” the statement said.

The spokesperson also criticized park staff who spoke with a ProPublica reporter. “Millions of hardworking Americans deal with workplace challenges every day without resorting to politically motivated leaks,” the spokesperson said.

One park ranger, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the talking points prevent rangers from telling the public the truth. Some employees have delivered the statements in an exaggerated “monotone” to convey to visitors they are toeing the company line but there’s more to the story, the ranger said.

“We have a duty to tell the public what’s going on,” the ranger said. “If that’s saying, ‘We just don’t have the staff to stay open and that’s what these firings are doing,’ I think the people have a right to know. Every person we lose hurts.”

In the immediate aftermath of the firings, parks quickly closed visitor centers, ended tours and altered other services. Some parks were clear on social media that the staffing cuts had resulted in the closures. But recently parks have been more vague in discussing the impact and not offered explanations for particular closures.

The administration has reinstated about 50 NPS employees and announced it will proceed with the hiring of seasonal employees, a workforce that is essential to park operations during the busy summer season. The hiring process, however, has been delayed, which may lead to operation disruptions. And more cuts are likely coming. The Hill recently reported that the administration is considering a 30% payroll reduction for the NPS.

The cuts come as the parks are seeing increases in visitation, which hit a record in 2024 for the first time since 2016. Although the new data was released on the park service’s website last week, the administration didn’t publicize that milestone with a news release as it has in the past. The terminations also come amid staffing shortages across the service.

Aviva O’Neil, executive director of the Great Basin National Park Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports a small park in a remote corner of Nevada, bristled at the idea put forth in the talking points that parks can continue to provide the same level of “memorable experiences” with the cuts. When the park lost five of its 26 permanent employees in February, it was forced to close tours of a signature attraction, Lehman Caves. To help restore services, the foundation raised the money to temporarily hire the terminated workers.

“How do they do their day-to-day operations when they don’t have the staff?” she said.

"If the storm gets really bad, my family and I will be in our basement. We are ready," Marcy Baker said.

Bidenomics created a manufacturing boom. Trump is tearing that up by the roots.

A tribute to Kevin Drum

by Taylor Kate Brown

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

Two inches of raw sewage. Persistent chemical leaks. Pipes insulated with asbestos. A bat infestation. Black mold. “It kind of blows my mind some of the things I found in public schools,” says Emily Schwing, a KYUK reporter and ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Recently, we published her investigation of dangerous conditions in deteriorating public schools in Alaska’s rural villages. Schwing, who reported this story while also participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship, spoke to dozens of sources, including local resident Taylor Hayden, who showed her concrete footings that had been reduced to rubble in one village school.

ProPublica has previously reported on how restrictive funding policies in Idaho have contributed to similarly dangerous school conditions.

In Alaska, a unique set of circumstances means the responsibility for school repairs in many rural villages rests exclusively on the state Legislature. Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, even though the state owns these buildings. As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. The impact is felt most by Alaska Natives.

For Schwing, the “record scratch” moment came when she realized some school districts were spending their own money, in one case $200,000, in a desperate effort to rank higher up the funding priority list, even going as far as hiring a lobbyist. Other districts told her they couldn’t do so without cutting teaching positions.

“Why are public school districts paying a lobbyist to convince lawmakers to invest in public schools, and even more so, to invest in infrastructure that the state owns?” she thought.

I called up Schwing to talk about the process of reporting this investigation and how different going to school can be for students across Alaska. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

What got you interested in this story?

I travel a lot to rural communities in Alaska, just by virtue of the things that I cover. And usually when you are traveling to villages, you stay in the school. I have always been surprised by the things that I’ve experienced there. On the Chukchi coast, there’s a school where you can’t see out the windows anymore because they’re so pitted from the wind. There was a school that I was in last year during a sled dog race that I was covering where I could smell the bathrooms from down the hall. That’s not normal. So I was keeping a list of things that were strange for public schools.

Then Taylor Hayden called me and told me what’s going on at the Sleetmute school. So I went out there. He showed me [the conditions] in the wood shop. And then we went under the building and I thought: “Oh my God. This is crazy.” It took off from there.

How does seeing that black mold and guano in person change the story for you?

I want to tell you about these two little kids I met, Edward and Loretta [in Sleetmute]. They’re in fourth grade. I’m in their school, and they’re giving me a tour: “This is our library, and this is our piano in the kindergarten room, and this is my favorite book.” They’re showing me their artwork. Never once did these kids say, “This is where the moldy part of our school is.” It made me sad to think that they think that this is normal for their school, but it also made me so proud of them for just being fourth-grade kids.

You can throw out numbers and statistics and do an investigation into these state records, but until you’re in the building, I don’t think the reality of how awful things are hits you. The kids are doing their homework at the lunch tables, or the high school kids are doing some really cool science projects, but they’re sitting in a school where if the wood shop collapses, it also takes the water system, the heat system, the HVAC, like all of the critical infrastructure, the electricity that keeps that school usable.

Watch “Alaska Has Ignored Hundreds of Requests to Fix Its Crumbling Public Schools“ What does a school mean to a place like Sleetmute?

I have visited over 45 villages off the road system in Alaska at this point in my career, and the school is the center of these communities. It’s the largest building. They’re one of two buildings with a guarantee that there will be running water. They’re places where people get together, where people socialize. They have pickup basketball nights and fundraisers.

Public schools in rural Alaska also serve an emergency management function that is often overlooked. If there is some sort of natural disaster — a flood, a giant storm, a severe drop in temperature — or if there’s some sort of other piece of critical infrastructure that’s having problems — the water plant burns down or the electricity goes out or the heating fuel doesn’t get delivered — people will go seek shelter in the school. Wildland firefighters and the National Guard will be based out of these buildings if they’re responding to a disaster.

But in order for it to be an effective emergency management tool, you have to have it safe and operational. There are so many more functions that the public school serves than just school.

Why do you think there’s such little urgency around these repairs?

There’s so much conversation around operational funding, to pay for textbooks and teacher salaries. Currently in our Legislature, it’s all the lawmakers can talk about.

The people who are offering testimony to lawmakers from urban areas are all about funding curriculum and keeping teachers. Then you hear public testimony from people in rural communities who can’t even get that far, because there are pots and pans on the floor to catch the leaks from the roof, or there’s a bucket of oil next to them in their classroom and there’s one in the hall. There’s a very clear boundary between what rural constituents are experiencing and what urban constituents are experiencing with respect to education.

It’s very easy to forget the hundreds of villages that exist in Alaska off the road system, because they are so small. That’s where the real problem lies — when you don’t notice, then you have a roof that leaks for 20 years, and then it turns into a real public health and safety crisis.

This story was translated to the Central Yup’ik dialect of Yugtun. Why was that important?

There are over 50 villages on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta that KYUK serves. It’s the predominant dialect spoken on the delta, and there are a lot of elders who speak Yup’ik as their first language. The vast majority of KYUK’s audience is Yup’ik.

The other thing that you’ll notice in this story is the vast majority of the population that is served by rural public schools are Indigenous. So the largest impact from a lack of investment in school infrastructure is on Alaska Natives. So I think it’s really important to the most affected people that we would deliver a story like this in their Indigenous and often first language.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR’s Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism.

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