For this article, I spoke with multiple officers working for federal land management agencies at different levels of authority; to protect them from retaliation, they will remain anonymous. I verified their employment status before interviewing them.
“You get paid in sunsets.”
It’s a cliche for law enforcement who work in the jewels of America’s crown: our national parks and forests. Like all cliches, it’s overused and inadequate to the real-life hardships playing out in the nearly 400,000 square miles of wilderness, water and shoreline patrolled by the law enforcement officers of the National Park Service (NPS) and US Forest Service (USFS).
While urban law enforcement agencies have constant media attention on their funding, recruiting and retention struggles, park rangers and USFS LEOs face the same problems but with no public conversation about how to fix them. It’s not because no one cares. It’s because, until recently, only insiders knew the problem existed.
The recent media firehose announcing federal firings, rescinded job offers, funding cuts and hiring freezes has changed that, but the problems have been brewing for decades.
The big picture problem
The simplest take is that our public lands are too popular for their own good, at least everywhere except in the congressional budget committees. The numbers of visitors keep rising and so does crime, including serious and violent crime. One Officer Doe in a PNW federal land management agency said it this way: “If people knew what goes on in the forests, it would shock the conscience.”
The parks and national forests are effectively remote places where cities erupt every summer, weekend and holiday - not thousands of visitors, but hundreds of millions. They hike, picnic, camp and take pictures. They get lost, get hurt, get sick, and leave poop on trails and in meadows. They also commit crime: vandalism, arson, domestic violence, sexual assaults and murder. Where national forests border densely populated urban areas, gang members use them for firearms training and dumping bodies. Drug traffickers use Forest Service roads as off-grid connectors between towns to evade the attention of law enforcement on patrolled hardtop. Private inholdings in national forests and parks complicate jurisdictions and make effective investigations or enforcement nearly impossible. NPS LE rangers have responded to multiple violent threats in the recent past, including an active shooter in Yellowstone NP. Like other LEOs, USFS officers and NPS LE rangers face violent assaults; ODMP is full of accounts of their murders as well.
And still, budgets are slashed regularly and the number of officers and rangers dwindles. The ranks of USFS LEOs are down to about 300 officers nationwide including special agents (investigators) and supervisors. There should be at least double that number; one officer expressed concern that if the numbers fall too far, federal administrators could simply disband the Forest Service’s law enforcement branch entirely.
Likewise, NPS rangers who once numbered well over 2,000 (and still were barely able to cover their vast beats) are now around 1,200 rangers and falling. An academy for LE rangers was scheduled to start on February 19. The hiring offers were rescinded in the barrage of federal freezes and cuts issued in January, despite assurances that “public safety” would be unaffected. The elite unit that investigates serious felonies in the parks now number just 30, down from 55 in 2000. Since their inception, these investigators have pursued kidnappers, poachers and serial killers in extreme environments; now, they seem to be an endangered species themselves and further cuts are expected whenever the next budget is finally passed.
Structural problems: Leadership, pay and morale
Both NPS and USFS have structural problems that make fixing morale, recruiting and retention harder. Relationships between leadership and law enforcement in these land management agencies can be awkward at higher levels and support can be uneven. Mixed messaging is common, whether it applies to mission definition or employee wellness.
A phrase I kept finding in books, articles, documentary films and chats with rangers was, “There’s nothing national about the National Park Service.”
Instead of one large agency with many locations, each park functions as its own town, with a “mayor”( the park superintendent) who makes administrative and budgetary decisions. Each park has its own policies and culture, necessitating relearning basics with each transfer. Most superintendents have backgrounds in conservation sciences, and little to no experience with law enforcement.
That leaves law enforcement rangers with the frustrating chore of keeping hundreds of thousands of visitors safe and juggling dozens of collateral duties, while working for a boss who might prefer that they don’t exist. Park superintendents want to take care of conservation duties and welcome park guests; forest supervisors want to hear about their officers handling timber theft, not gang murders. “Smokey in a flak jacket” is jarring to that vision.
Both USFS and NPS LEOs fall into categories that pay them less than other federal LEOs and throttle advancement. Multiple USFS LE supervisory positions are going unfilled because no one wants to apply for them: the difference in pay simply isn’t worth the stress of the added responsibility and liability. A former ranger said, “Every (one of my) FLETC classmate(s) has either left, or expressed a desire to.” He’s among that number, working now for an agency without the complications of resource management.
Schedules further impact morale. Both USFS officers and NPS rangers are mandated to work every weekend and often nights as well, without hope of ever rotating out of that schedule. It’s in the job description.
And as one ranger put it, “It can force parents to make impossible decisions.”
Unique financial pressures
When people think “rural” they also tend to think “low cost of living.” For officers and rangers in the national forests and parks, that’s a fallacy. National forest assignments in remote places can mean very little housing available at any cost; by definition, public land is not developable land. It often also means long distances from schools, groceries and medical care and sparse employment opportunities for trailing spouses. Even remote work isn’t an easy option where internet and cell service is unreliable.
For the forests that border large urban areas, housing is more abundant but costs are driven ever higher by competition from buyers and renters in fields much more lucrative than crime fighting in the woods.
The national parks present an even more specialized housing problem. One NPS supervisor said simply, “It’s a company town.” Rangers are “required occupants” who must live in assigned housing owned by the Park Service. Rent, tied by government policy to market rates, is deducted from their pay. The housing markets near prestigious parks like Grand Teton NP are dominated by vacation homes for the rich, like Jackson Hole where a single family home averages more than a million dollars. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon NP and coastal parks have similar problems.
The rent money is supposed to go back into maintenance for the housing but it also pays the maintenance employees (“Who are our underpaid neighbors,” said the supervisor). Maintenance and improvements are a “mixed bag” resulting in substandard housing at high market rates, with no option to move out. Rangers who advocate for improvements are labeled complainers and troublemakers. Spouses can find employment with park concessionaires but childcare is nearly impossible to access.
An unknown future
No one wants to think of our public lands as without hope for the people who keep it safe. Most of the officers and rangers who work in these beautiful places pursued their positions as dream jobs, and even when disillusioned still hold on to their love of the outdoors and wild places.
The NPS supervisor said he has had a wonderful career, and that the agency has changed for the better but the pace is glacial. Younger rangers coming in have different expectations regarding working conditions and housing, and he added, “That’s not bad.” He had three great mentors coming up, and wants to be that for new rangers, presuming hiring resumes someday.
But the public has to be practical as well. The officers and rangers who safeguard the wild places, who take on roles from criminal investigation to search and rescue, who deal with obstreperous beasts on four feet and two as well as wildfires, floods and avalanches, need practical support. They need change.
The sunsets were never enough. We can’t let the red on the horizon be a profession in flames.
