A 23-year-old park guide at Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park, Helen Dhue, found out she’d been fired during a layover in Dallas on Friday, on her way home from a National Park Service business trip.
“The department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills and abilities do not meet the department’s current needs,” read the email she received, according to the New York Times.
Dhue is one of 1,000 National Park Service employees affected by federal job cuts imposed by the Trump administration. Her firing comes at the same time a former Yosemite National Park official laments a “catastrophic” outcome of Trump’s cuts, leading to reduced services and worse.
The executive director of the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Tim Whitehouse, argues the NPS firings make little sense. “It’s not going to save the government any money,” he said. “It’s going to degrade our parks, demoralize people that work very hard for very little money, and make the government a hostile place to be.”
During the first weeks of the Trump administration, significant efforts have been made to overhaul the federal workforce. One of the administration’s first acts was to summarily fire Justice Department prosecutors who had helped investigate Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. These career DOJ officials, who had worked under presidents of both parties, were terminated, it’s believed, due to their role in investigating the president’s conduct.
The Trump administration has also sought to persuade federal employees into resigning, offering “buyout” packages of around eight months’ pay if they voluntarily leave their positions. This move is seen by many as an unconstitutional attempt to purge the “deep state” of officials not aligned with Trump’s political agenda.
The administration’s actions have extended beyond the DOJ, with a reported plan to target Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices across the federal government. Internal documents from the Trump-aligned “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) outlined a multi-phase strategy to identify and terminate DEI-linked employees, even in statutorily mandated civil rights offices.
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