November 20, 2025, Seward Folly Editorial by Mareth Griffith

As I am writing this, the federal government has just reopened after a shutdown of forty-three days. For many of our neighbors who work for federal agencies, this has meant over a month of being furloughed, or working without pay. This is merely the latest in a series of budget cuts andreductions in force that have roiled the federal workforce over the last 10 months. There may well be further cuts on the horizon. The proposed 2026 federal budget recommends cuttingNational Park Service (NPS) staff down to just 5,500 positions, down from a 2024 staffing levelof 13,600. (For comparison in 2015, the NPS employed over 23,000 people, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is unclear how many of these were full-time positions.) Even as thestaffing levels have dropped, park visitations have increased, to a record-breaking 331 million visits to American parks in 2024. I wanted to examine how budget reductions in federal agencies like the NPS and the Forest Service have played out here locally in Seward – how they haveaffected our community, and the members of our community who work in government jobs.

In Anchorage, according to the National Parks Conservation Alliance (NPCA), the NPS

Regional Office has reportedly lost a third of its staff. The positions that were eliminated include the chief ranger, a position in charge of law enforcement within the parks, the regional director and three associate regional directors, and the program manager for Alaska Native affairs. Also departing, the regional geologist, whose work, among other things, included assessing risk for landslides and tsunamis – both of which are big concerns to coastal communities such as Seward. The NPCA estimates that since January, the NPS as a whole has lost about 25% of its full-time employees.

Locally in Seward, employees of Kenai Fjords National Park have also been feeling the

strain. I spoke to a Seward resident and current NPS employee who has worked for the Park foralmost two decades. They requested not to be named in this article, as they do not have

permission from NPS to speak to the media. They say the 25% reported loss of full-time

employees is about in line with the staff loss at Kenai Fjords. Some of these losses include

positions, like the park superintendent, who took the ‘fork in the road’ offer and have remained on the NPS payroll for months after having resigned their positions. “We’re paying people not to work,” they said.

The past ten months working for the NPS have been ‘a firehose of alarming things’.

Examples include funding for projects, such as Student Conservation Association work crews, being pulled at the last minute, and long-planned projects stalled indefinitely because any project over $50,000 needed approval directly from the Secretary of the Interior. (The Dept of the Interior employs about 70,000 people spread across an estimated 2,400 locations, according to the DOI website.) These changes were presented as making the NPS more productive, turning the NPS into a more efficient force operating at less expense to taxpayers. What this employee was seeing on the ground here in Seward was that last summer was the least productive they had experienced in two decades working for Kenai Fjords.

Along with the firings, resignations and retirements, Kenai Fjords staff were told they were

not allowed to cut hours or visitor services as a result of the reduced headcount. The park

employee I spoke with said that last summer, they were still able to provide the same level of services to visitors as before, but it was becoming more difficult. And, they noted, employees who had to take on tasks associated with a higher pay band were not being compensated for the additional responsibilities. This is a sadly familiar situation to what Seward is currently seeing in our schools, where we have library aides but no librarians, theater technicians but no drama teachers, special needs aides, but no special needs teachers. It’s disappointing to see so many of our local year-round jobs being paid at a lower level while expected to take on the responsibilities of a higher-paid position.

Further west in the peninsula, the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge is now down to an

estimated 19 employees from 25 positions in January according to the Friends of Alaska

National Wildlife Refuges. Positions that have been vacated and not replaced include the refuge manager, two law enforcement, and two maintenance positions. Situated on the road system within an hour’s drive of Kenai and Soldotna, the Kenai NWR is the most-visited wildlife refuge in the state, with well over a million visits each year. For comparison, in 2008, the Refuge had only 500,000 visits a year, and employed a staff of 33.

Elsewhere in Seward, the National Marine Fisheries Service, part of NOAA, had a local field

office whose lease was allowed to expire in June. While the NOAA website’s Divisions and

Programs list still shows the Seward office being active, calling the phone number provided

connected me to a phone menu where an automated voice endlessly asked for my party’s

extension. A contact at the US Forest Service, who also wished to remain anonymous, said that while no staff had been fired, the difficult working atmosphere caused some people to find non- federal employment and others to retire. None of those vacated positions have been re-hired. With fewer people working, staff have had to triage what projects actually can be accomplished. “It’s really hard to be a federal employee right now,” they added.