Despite DOGE at Interior, Yellowstone staffing ‘higher than last year’

Five days into the Trump administration’s DOGE takeover of the Department of Interior’s policy, management and budget, Yellowstone National Park staffing is “higher than last year,” an Interior Department spokesperson in Washington, D.C. said Monday.

​​Yellowstone Park confirmed the increase. “Going into this year, we should have a total of 769 NPS employees,” park spokeswoman Linda Veress said in an email, up from 748 last year. During the park’s record year for visitation in 2021, the park’s workforce numbered 693 permanent and seasonal workers.

“We had an outstanding opening weekend, and it was great to see everyone enjoying the park,” Yellowstone Park Superintendent Cam Sholly said in an email Monday. “The plow crews are working hard to clear the remainder of the park’s roads from snow, and we are on schedule for our normal sequenced opening in the upcoming weeks, including the Beartooth Highway.”

After personally greeting the season’s first visitors at the West Entrance on Friday, Sholly reported the opening weekend drew 8,324 vehicles from there and the North Entrance at Mammoth, the only two entrances that have opened so far. That’s an increase of more than 11% from last year and put the weekend rush, unofficially Sholly said, at 21,642.

The staffing and opening weekend updates came as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum put an oilfield executive in charge of “consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions” at the 70,000-person agency last week. Burgum, earlier this year, named Tyler Hassen as assistant secretary for policy, management and budget. Now Hassen will oversee Burgum’s consolidation order as the Trump administration’s DOGE plan to shrink the size of the federal government advances.

Burgum’s appointment of Hassen and the consolidation order sparked worries in the conservation community, including at the Center for Western Priorities. The Denver-based nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization accused the secretary of abdicating his responsibilities by not reserving any authority over firings or requiring any reporting by Hassen.

“If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of Western Priorities. “Instead, it looks like Burgum plans to sit by the fire eating warm cookies while Elon Musk’s lackeys dismantle our national parks and public lands,” she said in a statement.

“Warm cookies” refers to a report in The Atlantic that Burgum’s chief of staff told political appointees to learn to bake cookies for their boss.

But potential visitors to the world’s first national park need not worry, said J. Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson at Burgum’s office.

“Visitors can expect the same great service they had in years past,” Peace wrote in an email Monday. “[I]n some National Parks, like at Yellowstone National Park, staffing numbers are higher than last year.”

Peace made her reassurances as regional business owners fret over the upcoming tourism season in Yellowstone, at neighboring Grand Teton and across Wyoming. Overseas traveler numbers to the U.S. dropped 11.6% in March after Trump tariffs, tariff threats, indiscriminate DOGE firings, resignations and economic turmoil battered expectations.

Oilman

The order Burgum issued Thursday gives Hassen, now an assistant secretary, authority over the department’s Working Capital Fund, an office that in 2023 provided $119 million for department functions. Hassen will be able to rewrite manuals outlining employee responsibilities and may transfer funds, programs, records and property, according to the order.

Burgum’s order described his actions as furthering Trump’s February initiative for “implementing the president’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ workforce optimization.”

In addition to great service at national parks, Bureau of Land Management lands in Wyoming remain welcoming, Peace wrote. “Visitors to BLM-managed public lands can expect continued access and service across recreation sites, trails and campgrounds,” her email reads. “We are implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency and government accountability.”

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Burgum and DOGE’s “unification effort” will accelerate technology, enhance the mission to preserve parks and historic sites, serve Native American tribes and manage department holdings in Wyoming, Burgum’s order states. All told, the Department of the Interior manages 2.34 million acres of national park system lands, 18.4 million acres of BLM property and 70,000 acres of Fish and Wildlife Service reserves in the state. 

In Wyoming, Interior-managed land accounts for a third of the state’s area or about 21 million acres.

Hassen, a Deerfield Academy prep and Princeton grad, was CEO of Basin Energy, a Houston-based international oilfield services company, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he worked for Wenzel Downhole Tools, Basin Power, and served as chairman of the associate board of the nonprofit Cancer Research Institute in New York. He was an associate involved in global energy investment banking at Morgan Stanley in New York and London from 2005-2008, according to his profile.

He emerged on the DOGE scene after the Los Angeles fires in January when President Trump said California Gov. Gavin Newsom compounded the firefighting problem by not diverting water to southern California. Critics said DOGE conflated agricultural diversions, needs of the endangered Sacramento-San Joaquin Estuary delta smelt and firefighting. 

Unqualified?

Western Priorities said DOGE efforts assign inexpert people to inappropriate positions.

“Since Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands, it’s up to Congress and the American people to stand up and demand oversight,” Rokala’s statement reads. “DOGE’s unelected bureaucrats in Washington have no idea how to staff a park, a wildlife refuge, or a campground. They have no idea how to manage a forest or prepare for fires in the wildland-urban interface. But Doug Burgum just gave DOGE free rein over all of that.”