Job Cuts Begin at Cuyahoga Valley National Park Amid DOGE's Valentine's Day Weekend Purge

Trail Blazer volunteers patrolling the Towpath Trail in an undated photo. The Cuyahoga Valley National Park may be relying more on volunteer assistance in light of recent federal cuts. Credit: National Park Service

While millions spent Valentine’s Day weekend in a hopeful romantic bliss, many suffered life-altering professional breakups as scores of employees of the U.S. government were laid-off en masse on Friday by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and Donald Trump.

The massive cuts of federal workers led by DOGE stretched across at least seven agencies, from 1,000 workers gone at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs to 1,000 at the National Park Service. Which means, along with at NASA, the IRS, the CDC, and the National Institute of Health, further impacts to Northeast Ohio.

At least a half dozen employees at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park were let go on Friday, several sources confirmed to Scene.

Deb Yandala, the president of the Conservancy for CVNP, told Scene she believes that the layoffs involved three or four maintenance workers and at least one planner—relatively new hires or probationary employees, as Musk’s DOGE has professed would be first on the chopping block.

Even though five or six employees let go constitutes just a half percentage of CVNP’s 134 workers, such a layoff will have a ripple effect across a multi-county park system that’s only been brimming with an increase in visitors in the past half decade. In 2023, CVNP saw roughly 2.9 million people enter its park boundaries, according to their Visitor Use Dashboard. That’s the highest level of recreational visitors since 2004.

“Like all national parks, operations [at CVNP] is bare bones,” Yandala said. “Nobody’s sitting around doing nothing. Everybody’s busy. So any position that’s cut is going to make a difference and a resulting impact on the public.”

CVNP has a pool of some 4,420 volunteers that handle tasks mostly related to cleanup and light patrol, like trash pickup and observational bike rides along the Towpath Trail.

But, as Yandala argued, the bulk of maintaining CVNP’s sheen and prestige has to be handled by trained staff. Volunteers are not the ones to clean toilets, mow lawns, take on park ranger duties or spearhead wildlife tours.

Since Valentine’s Day, there’s been a spike in volunteer interest from the general public. But, “please know, from our perspective, that doesn’t solve the problem of not having trained park staff,” Yandala said.

Since President Trump’s inauguration on January 20, Musk has championed DOGE’s purge of federal workers as primarily a means to try and better manage the U.S.’ annual deficit of almost $2 trillion.

He’s taken to Twitter/X to gloat about worker cuts primarily from a fiscal (and not alwasy accurate) point-of-view, even going as far as to compare DOGE’s purge to President Bill Clinton’s own cuts—of 100,000 workers—in the early 1990s.

“Today, DOGE and 10 agencies made 586 wasteful contracts bid adieu!” Musk wrote on Twitter/X on Friday, right before the NPS cuts. “With a ceiling value of $2.1B and $445M in savings secured, A perfect Valentine’s gift for all taxpayers—well-earned and deserved!”

Musk’s attitude follows the ideology of President Trump’s dozens of executive orders meant to stymie or curtail most if not all federal grants and programs that have anything to do with environmental concerns or sympathies to diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

And it appears that national parks fall into that bucket, which have led to anxities from NPS employees themselves as to what 1,000 workers gone may mean for what will likely be a record turnout this summer.

“There will be long lines at the parks’ fee booths, closed visitor centers, overflowing toilets, and poop on the trails,” a laid-off worker at Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Park wrote in D.C. Report. “But there will also be severely impaired natural and cultural resources. This is happening at a time when we need public lands more than ever.”

Which is why, Yandala said, she herself doesn’t comprehend how cutting 1,000 NPS jobs would really amount to impacting a government that regularly spends almost $7 trillion a year.

“I just can’t imagine that cutting, you know, a handful of staff positions really impacts the federal budget,” she said. “I mean, these are functions that the park needs.”