With limited insight into the Trump administration’s plans for the Interior Department, and recent reassignments affecting some of the agency’s top experts, current and former staff are seeing signs of a dramatic shake-up on the horizon.
In the latest example, the superintendents of all of the country’s national parks have been called to unusual in-person meetings with National Park Service political leadership later this month, scheduled for just a few weeks before the end of the government fiscal year.
“Attendance is mandatory and expected. We will use this time to discuss agency priorities, our FY 2027 outlook, and other matters important to the work ahead,” wrote Frank Lands, the deputy director of operations for NPS, in communication to park leaders reviewed by NOTUS.
The meetings are all scheduled for the week of Sept. 14 at each regional office around the country, with agency leadership suggesting they may travel to attend each meeting.
Trending
The timing has alarmed current park service staff and former superintendents, who told NOTUS that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has until now largely prohibited travel for senior park service staff. They are anticipating a major reorganization of the agency that they fear could resurrect previously abandoned efforts to cut or consolidate NPS offices focused on science, wildlife monitoring and culture. Staff in other bureaus throughout the department echoed those concerns to NOTUS in recent days.
Employees said the coordinated rollout elevated their levels of panic. Individual park and headquarters staff — in D.C. and in Colorado — told NOTUS they have been left out of the discussions entirely.
These fears have reached former park service leaders. A coalition of 20 former park superintendents, including former leaders of Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Acadia, wrote to Burgum on Wednesday, warning that any reorganization of the park service would “make it all the more difficult” for the agency to serve the needs of the parks.
“Requiring attendance at a last minute meeting at the end of the fiscal year is unusual in this current environment, to say the least. And it is concerning, given the consolidation that has occurred since January 2025, and the efforts at reorganization we have seen at DOI and throughout other federal agencies,” the superintendents wrote in the letter, organized by the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and shared exclusively with NOTUS.
“Reorganizations can be useful when they are carefully planned, transparent and driven by the mission. They can also cause enormous damage when they are rushed through from the top, without understanding how a complex organization actually functions,” they wrote.
The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In August, Interior reassigned about 30 of its most senior civil servants — known as senior executive service employees — to new roles, requiring many people to move into new jobs with limited relationship to their background and expertise, NOTUS previously reported. Those who were reassigned were given two weeks to accept the change or resign.
Those reassignments did not include regional staff, though some employees said they expect that to change in the coming weeks.
Interior has already reorganized its workforce once under Burgum’s tenure.
In 2025, the agency moved people specialized in human resources, information technology, contracting and other related areas from bureaus such as the park service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into a centralized organization within Burgum’s office.
While the agency carried out that reorganization, it simultaneously lost more than 10,000 employees across its many bureaus, largely through deferred resignation and retirement incentive programs designed by the Trump administration. The National Park Service has lost almost one-quarter of the permanent, full-time employees it had at the beginning of the second Trump administration, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management’s staffing database.
Federal spending law requires the Interior Department to get permission from Congress before it reorganizes its bureaus. The Republican leaders of the committees with jurisdiction over the department did not respond to requests for comment.
Authors
