It’s over. The 43-day federal government shutdown — the longest in US history — has ended. But now what? The budget for FY26 still doesn’t exist. NPS permanent staff is down more than 24% since January 2025. The Roadless Rule is threatened. The Ambler Road project is moving forward. Presidential executive orders are directing the National Park Service to sanitize American history. And Secretarial Order SO3431 sent letters to park superintendents instructing them on what to remove, cover up, or change. Alan Spears, Senior Director of Cultural Resources and registered lobbyist at the National Parks Conservation Association, joins The Parks Podcast.

 

A note from Missy: It’s finally over. The Government is back open, so how do our parks get back up to speed? I wanted to chat with Alan Spears to learn more, and hear what other challenges we face in the coming weeks.

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Episode Guest

Alan Spears – Senior Director of Cultural resources & registered Lobbyist
National Parks Conservation Association

Key Facts and Issues Covered

The shutdown:

  • 43 days — longest in US history
  • Parks ordered to stay open (unlike 2013)
  • NPS permanent staff down 24%+ since January 2025 (NPCA tracking)
  • $2M+ in lost fee revenue (no one at collection booths)
  • Backcountry search and rescue calls increased exponentially at Yosemite during shutdown
  • Morale described as “sub-subterranean”
  • Employees told to work without guaranteed pay guarantees
  • Back pay still uncertain for some workers
  • Continuing resolution in place through January 2026

 

The budget:

  • House proposal: $176M MORE cut from NPS budget
  • Senate bill: flat level funding + provisions against mass firings (preferred by NPCA)
  • No FY26 budget agreement; another shutdown possible January 2026

 

History erasure — SO3431 (Secretarial Order):

  • Presidential executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history” (March 2025)
  • SO3431 operationalizes it for NPS and Interior
  • QR codes installed in all national parks — designed to let visitors report interpretation they found offensive
  • Comments 10-to-1 in FAVOR of complete, unfiltered history
  • Letters sent to park superintendents with lists of what to remove/change
  • Actions taken or attempted: Climate change signs removed at Acadia; indigenous treaty rights signs removed at Jamaica Bay; attempt to remove enslaved people exhibit at Independence Hall (still up due to community opposition); attempt to remove “Whipped Peter” photograph at Fort Pulaski (believed still up)
  • Websites scrubbed; interpretation changed

 

What NPCA recommends:

  • Thank a park ranger when you see one
  • Visit npca.org for advocacy alerts and issue updates
  • Contact your elected representative — especially during the 2026 election year when they’re in their home districts
  • Look for programs that tell complete, inclusive, accurate history during the 250th anniversary of American independence

Show Notes & Links

Episode Transcript

After the Government Shutdown — What’s Next for Our Parks and Public Lands
The Parks Podcast, Episode 48 | Alan Spears, Senior Director of Cultural Resources & Registered Lobbyist, National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA)

Note: This episode was recorded in November 2025, following the 43-day government shutdown — the longest in US history. Budget figures, staffing levels, and policy references reflect conditions at that time. Visit npca.org for current updates.

Where Things Stand After the Shutdown

Missy Rentz: I’m thrilled to welcome Alan Spears to The Parks Podcast. Alan is the Senior Director of Cultural Resources at the National Parks Conservation Association. He’s also a registered lobbyist in the Government Affairs Department. Alan, welcome to The Parks Podcast.

Alan Spears: Thanks, Missy. It’s great to be with you.

Missy: When we first started talking about you coming on The Parks Podcast, we weren’t really sure if the government shutdown would be over. It is, which is great — but now what? What’s going on when it comes to the parks and public lands?

Alan: Oh, well, everybody’s come together in complete agreement on how we move forward in a bipartisan, unilateral way. Just kidding. So 43 days — I think it was — that’s the longest shutdown in the history of the United States government. We could talk about a lot of things coming out of the shutdown. But where we are is we still don’t have a budget for FY26. We got, in my opinion as an advocate for national parks and someone who works for the National Parks Conservation Association, a really bad budget proposal out of the House of Representatives back in July — before the shutdown — that would cut probably about $176 million more from the National Park Service budget. So we’re not a fan of that. The Senate then came out with a bill that holds flat level funding for FY26 and included a couple of provisions about preventing mass firings and RIFs at the Park Service. We like that bill much better. But we still don’t have a timeline on when either of those things will get moving in the House and Senate. And with the past being prologue, we’ve got a continuing resolution in place until the end of January 2026 — when we may yet again find ourselves headed towards yet another government shutdown if people can’t agree on the top-line numbers.

The Real Impact — Morale, Money, and the Illusion of Normal

Missy: What was the impact of the shutdown on our parks and public lands?

Alan: I think it was tremendous. But the thing that most of the public should understand is that the National Park Service — these people are masters at not showing how much they’re being stretched or stressed. The Park Service was actually under orders during this most recent shutdown to do what they can to keep parks open, maintain visitor services, and keep the trash picked up. But parks generate about $56 billion in economic revenue. And when they are closed or partially closed, we are robbing communities of that money. I think we lost somewhere around $2 million in fee collection because some parks that were opened didn’t have anybody on staff to sit in the fee collection booths. There are places like Yosemite that have seen staffing reductions, and then the shutdown furloughed a bunch of staff at the same time they were seeing historic rises in visitation — and we’re told that backcountry search and rescue calls increased exponentially during that period. Sometimes there were people there who could answer those calls. Sometimes, maybe not.

Alan: There were impacts, but I think maybe the biggest impact of all is not budget, it’s not numbers — it was the morale of the people who work for the National Park Service. That morale was already subterranean. You go to a high-rise building or a shopping center, you get in the elevator and you see P1, P2, P4 — I think Park Service morale is somewhere down by P5 at this point, and maybe below that. And it’s just getting worse, because employees were being — I’m going to use the word deliberately — abused during the shutdown process. Being told to work but not being guaranteed that they would be paid. And we still have a question about whether or not some employees will receive back pay that they deserved for working during portions of the shutdown. So it’s a mess. And morale, I think, took another hit. That breaks my heart — being a fan of National Park Service rangers, historians, interpreters, and maintenance staff, all the people who are out there keeping these resources up and running and open to the public.

Missy: Yeah. And I was at a few places and you run into rangers and you would never know. They are brilliant. They love their jobs, they love what they do, they’re kind and welcoming. You wouldn’t get that at any other industry when they’re stressed like they are. We did two other episodes during the shutdown with former park rangers, and I did get a lot of people saying, I went to the park and it was just fine. But those rangers are saying: it’s not front-facing that you’re going to see it. It’s the back of house. It’s the fact that they can’t do crime investigations, they can’t rescue people, they can’t fix things — those are the things that were really hurting during that time.

Alan: The phrase that comes to mind is Potemkin Village. You’ve got this great facade and it looks like everything is wonderful. But maybe not. I think we all could use a little bit more understanding of what it takes — the service and the sacrifice — to keep a place like Yellowstone or Gettysburg or even the Frederick Douglass Home up and running and open to the public. Because it’s a lot of back-end operation that you don’t necessarily see when you show up, pay your fee, get a brochure, see the video in the visitor center, and then get one of those excellent interpretive talks from a Park Service ranger. It takes a lot to put that on.

Are the Parks Back to Normal?

Missy: Can we assume everything is back to normal? And I just want to say — “normal” before the shutdown was already understaffed. But are they back up and running now?

Alan: No, we can’t make that assumption. And the answer is going to be on a park-by-park basis. My organization, NPCA, is tracking a more than 24% decrease in permanent staff for the Park Service just since the start of this year. Staffing levels have just gone down — from reductions in force, the DOGE “fork in the road” offer of a buyout: either take a buyout and deferred resignation now or risk being terminated later. The staffing issue may actually exceed the budget issue. They’re both tied together, along with history erasure. Those three things are a triumvirate of challenges right now.

Alan: So you reopen a site. Maybe the person who was the superintendent took deferred resignation — they’re gone. Maybe some other people were hit in a RIF — they’re gone. You’ve had a consolidation of your IT and human resources department. So those folks are gone. And I don’t think we ever fully recovered from the fact that earlier this year, the Park Service was not able to hire their seasonal employees in the way that they wanted. The decision to ease up on that came so late that a lot of seasonal help just wasn’t there. If you’re going to have somebody at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia — one of my favorite places to go — you’ve got to have them in late March or April to start training. When that initial hiring was delayed, you had parks that weren’t able to pick up seasonal employees. There is no more excess left to cut within that agency. So sure, we’ve got parks that are opening back up — but what are they opening up with? That’s the question right now.

Missy: And so if you’re planning a trip, it’s really important to do your own research and see what’s open and available to visit.

Alan: I think that’s a critical point. At larger landscape parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, there will be standard operating procedure — roads and trails closing because of inclement weather or wildlife considerations. But at smaller historical sites — we had a staff person at NPCA who went to visit the Maggie Walker site in Richmond. And if folks have an interest in the African American experience, especially African American women’s history, the Maggie Walker site is a really great place to learn about this important woman. They appeared to have hours of operation limited to weekends — Saturdays and Sundays — and that’s directly due to staffing and funding. So you do have to call ahead. And it probably is best to make that phone call rather than rely on a website that maybe hasn’t been updated frequently enough to catch all the nuances of staffing and operational hours.

History Erasure — Secretarial Order 3431 and What It Means

Missy: Okay. So we’ve jumped from major staffing cuts in February to this land grab in May and June. Then we had the Roadless Rule, followed by the Ambler Road, and then the government shutdown. But what’s next? What are we up against — because we know it’s not over.

Alan: Well, the one thing missing from that very inclusive list is the presidential order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” President Trump dropped that executive order in March. It was followed up by Secretarial Order 3431, sent out by Secretary Doug Burgum on May 20th of this year. The secretarial order operationalizes the presidential executive order for national parks and any public lands management agencies within the Interior Department that are managing historic and cultural resources.

Alan: The idea on the part of the administration is that American history has been overtaken by woke people — that it’s no longer history, it’s indoctrination. So anything that has to do with race, racism, Black subordination, white supremacy, transgender rights or activists — mention of that has been excised from National Park Service interpretation. And we could also see history erasure aimed at things like labor rights and history in this country, women’s rights and women’s suffrage. We have already seen efforts to downgrade, edit, or erase the history of this country’s relationships with native and indigenous peoples. So when Secretarial Order 3431 was released on May 20th, the first impact was QR codes in all national parks. The idea was that people visiting these sites would scan them — and if during your visit to, say, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, or the Frederick Douglass Home here in DC, if you saw anything that offended you, you could scan the QR code and write in your complaint. It was basically designed to help the public tattle on park rangers and get people in trouble.

Alan: Fortunately, the comments coming in from that QR code — at least the original batch in May, June, and maybe a little bit of July — were about 10 to 1 in favor of the National Park Service telling a complete, unfiltered American story. People saying, we actually want more of this. More about native people, more civil rights stories. It was an admonishment of the administration: keep your hands off our history. Let the Park Service do what they’re meant to do. And maybe just to stop for a second and say — the National Park Service, all 433 units, manage, protect, and interpret historic and cultural resources. That’s not just small battlefields or cultural resource sites in the east — it’s the large landscape sites in the west as well. The Park Service has really been in the history business since its inception in 1916, and that’s why this effort to sanitize or erase history in parks was such a big deal.

Alan: The QR codes were followed by instructions from the National Park Service and from Interior leadership to park superintendents: give us a list of anything in your interpretive array that might run afoul of SO3431. Those lists were submitted — not all parks did, but most did — and then letters of compliance were sent out in September, basically advising national parks on what they had to remove, cover up, or sanitize. We saw interpretive signs about climate change taken down at Acadia National Park in Maine. At Jamaica Bay in the New York area, signage about the abrogation of treaty rights with indigenous communities and tribes was removed — felt to be denigrating of Americans and America. Independence Hall still has an exhibit on the enslaved people that General Washington brought with him from Mount Vernon to Philadelphia in 1790 when he began serving as president — remember, there wasn’t a Washington DC to go to until 1800 — and the administration actually wanted that entire external interpretation exhibit ripped out of its roots and removed from the park. And then we saw the Park Service get instructions to remove the photograph of “Whipped Peter” from interpretation about the horrors of slavery that was featured at Fort Pulaski in Georgia.

Alan: We did see interpretive signage removed. But the display about enslaved people is still up at Independence Hall because there was an uproar from community leaders — you can’t touch this. And it seems like there was enough opposition generated by groups like NPCA that the “Whipped Peter” photograph is still up at Fort Pulaski. So those are wins. But we’re not done yet. We’re likely to see more attempts to erase or sanitize American history as it’s being told in national parks. And this is something that we’ve got to fight back on. To paraphrase the character from A Few Good Men — we can handle the truth. We want the truth. We want that complex history because it’s that nuance that makes history so compelling. We don’t have to take down Robert E. Lee. We just have to make sure we add Harriet Tubman.

The Senate Stewardship Caucus — A Reason for Hope

Missy: Just recently, Senator Sheehy and Senator Heinrich started what they call the Senate Stewardship Caucus. Senator Tim Sheehy is a Republican from Montana. Senator Martin Heinrich is a Democrat from New Mexico. This caucus is meant to be bipartisan — to promote conservation and the management of our public lands and parks. Is this promising? Is this a good thing?

Alan: Yeah, I think it’s promising. We’ll have to see where it goes. I’m going to say something harsh and then hopefully sweeten it up a little bit. It feels like the 119th Congress spent the better part of this year abdicating much of its responsibility on public lands and budgeting. We still have champions and heroes on both sides of the aisle — and Independents — who I think are understanding that the need to stand up for national parks is still a critical thing. Their constituents want it. No district, no state in the nation benefited from a government shutdown that closed down or partially closed down national parks. And so the development of a Stewardship Caucus is a good thing, if they embrace the power that they have as lawmakers and appropriators. But we need better budgets. We need better policy. And we need people to be prepared to oppose this administration as they continue to propose more mass terminations, more firings, more RIFs. And when we see people in the Department of Government Efficiency restricting people in the federal government to a $1 limit on their credit cards for purchases needed to keep a park open on a daily basis — those things are ridiculous. There isn’t a federal organization in the history of humankind that wouldn’t have benefited from some streamlining and reorganization. But so much damage has been done to our national parks at this point in time that we are definitely going to need people like the senators you mentioned to pull together in a bipartisan way to make sure these parks are protected.

Alan: It’s important to understand: more than 100 years ago, we the people in this country made a decision that we were going to set aside, in perpetuity, for the benefit, enjoyment, and inspiration, some of the best places on the American landscape — scenic, recreational, natural, cultural, historic. It is way too late for us to walk back on that commitment right now. In fact, we need to double down on it. I welcome a Stewardship Caucus in the Senate. Let’s hope we get one in the House, and let’s hope our congressional champions recover their desire, their ability, their commitment to our national parks and our public lands. We need them now more than ever before.

What You Can Do Right Now

Missy: Alan, what can listeners do? Listeners of this podcast are either lovers of our parks or curious about our parks and public lands. What can we do? What do we need to be prepared to do to advocate?

Alan: So the first thing I would say is: for anybody who has an opportunity to visit a national park, the first time you see someone in a National Park Service uniform — or a volunteer in parks — you need to convey to that person that we love them, we respect them, we care about them, and we’re doing whatever we can to make sure they understand that and that they’re getting backed up in the way that they need to be backed up. So I think that’s the first thing. It’s just the human thing of making sure we’re thanking the people that we need to thank.

Alan: The second thing is NPCA is a 501(c)(3) advocacy organization. You can visit our website at npca.org and see talking points about breaking issues, learn about what’s going on in our national parks, and find activist alerts where you can send a letter or get a template on how to connect with your elected representatives to let them know parks are important — and that the budgeting, staffing, and history erasure issues need to be reversed.

Alan: Third — I’m not asking people to drop everything to become an advocate for the national parks. That’s my job. But you can help me do my job by taking an interest, and on a quarterly basis if not a monthly basis, checking in on our website, sending a letter, making sure your elected representative understands that parks are important to you. And here’s a tip: we’re heading into an election year. A lot of people are going to be out of Washington and back in their home districts. They’re going to be at the barbecue pit, at the softball game, at the library opening. And they’re going to want to ask the public for questions. That’s a good time for you and two of your friends in the audience to raise your hands and say: I want to know your views on our national parks and the preservation of our public lands. There’s such a thing as congressional math. They’re expecting questions about the budget. They might not be expecting the questions about national parks or the National Heritage area that’s in your region. And when two people ask a question about national parks, it’s multiplied — because the folks receiving the questions understand that if two people are asking, maybe 20 or 200 people in their district or state are interested. And that’s a big number they’ll want to address.

Alan: And last — we are coming up on the 250th anniversary of American Independence. Please check in locally. The Park Service is going to be doing some things, but the money’s a little questionable about what they’ll get to help celebrate the semiquincentennial of American Independence. Look for programs that embrace the breadth and depth of that history. Because the last thing we need for the semiquincentennial is just fireworks — which are lovely — and a bunch of guys in white wigs with blue coats shooting blanks at a bunch of guys in white wigs and red coats. We need something that is accurate, inclusive, and inspiring. So look for those programs and support them with your participation.

Missy: I love it. Alan, I recently came across a list of blog posts from you on the NPCA website — I’m going to link to them on our episode page. If you want more information on Alan’s thoughts, research, experience, and books to read, he has an incredible array of blog posts at npca.org.

Alan: Oh, thank you.

Missy: Yeah. They were fantastic. I have added to my reading list based off of your blog from January. Alan, thank you so much for your passion, your knowledge, and everything that you give to the parks and that you’ve been gracious to give to us today.

Alan: Missy, it’s my pleasure. We’ll do this again sometime, I hope, and maybe have slightly more positive news to share with people.

Missy: Yeah, I’d really like to tap into the cultural history — you are going to be someone I’m pinging for that as we move into a special series on The Parks Podcast.

Alan: Absolutely — be my pleasure. You just let me know. I’m standing by.

Missy: Wonderful. Well, happy holidays to you and your family, happy holidays to our listeners, and until next time — we’ll see you in the parks.

Music for The Parks Podcast is performed and produced by Porter Hardy. Follow us @TheParksPodcast or visit TheParksPodcast.com.