The Year of Doing Less with Less
At the National Park Service, landscape architects are facing brutal cuts and what they consider affronts to the agency’s mission.
MAY 6, 2026 / By BRADFORD MCKEE/ FROM THE MAY 2026 ISSUE
Landscape architects may have been instrumental in creating and guiding the National Park Service over the past century, but the past year has had its staff landscape architects watching nervously as things have headed in directions much at odds with long-standing priorities for the national parks. At the beginning, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., a main advocate for the service, drafted the purpose of the National Park Service in the Organic Act of 1916: The park service should safeguard the scenery, wildlife, and history held within the national parks and “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” A century later, landscape architects in the park service fulfill Olmsted’s maxim in pivotal roles across design and construction, preservation, ecological protection, recreation, and community planning. They collaborate with the agency’s many specialists to ensure safe access to the parks and the enjoyment of visitors while protecting the unique assets the United States holds as a public trust.
Currently, landscape architects with the park service—about 122 of them—are adapting to the effects of a broad, often arbitrary shearing of the agency’s payrolls, budgets, and programs. That effort began in January 2025 amid a mass reduction of federal operations by President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. The park service didn’t escape DOGE’s crosshairs despite being the federal entity probably best loved by Americans and a world of tourists, the huge economic benefits the national parks generate for local economies, and the service’s already chronic underfunding by Congress.
DOGE’s arrival led to more than a year of whiplash for civil servants with the park service. In the previous five years, the agency had gained ground on many long-delayed needs with flush new funding streams. But DOGE’s cuts and substantial takebacks by the Trump administration brought an abrupt reversal to much of that. Across this typically steady agency, the Trump-era cuts are straining visitor accommodation in the parks, halting improvement projects already underway, making the planning of new projects harder, and eating away at morale. Much of the agency’s staff are lifers, accustomed to working under the park service’s exacting and widely influential standards of stewardship.
Between the staff losses at every level and other so-called efficiency measures, plus funding instability beyond the ordinary budget lapses, landscape architects with the park service say that work disruptions have become routine and dispiriting. For this article, LAM talked to a dozen landscape architects working for the park service, either as staff or contractors, to report from the inside about the impacts. Of those who agreed to comment, none were willing to be identified.
The park service manages 85 million acres across 433 national parks, seashores, monuments, battlefields, and other sites. Its visitation numbers have risen in recent years to a record of 332 million visits in 2024, but fell by 9 million last year. Investment in the park service, though, has lagged for years. In hard numbers, Congress increased the agency’s core annual budget by 36 percent between 2014 and 2023; in the latter year, it received $3.5 billion. But when adjusted for inflation, the increase was just 7 percent, against an 11 percent rise in visitation during that decade and incalculable material needs that have arisen in the parks because of changing environmental conditions, especially climate change. The budgeting trend has saddled the park service with deferred maintenance valued at $23 billion for things such as buildings and infrastructure that lack adequate restoration or repair (see “Surge Time,” LAM, August 2016).
Then, after years of stretched funding, things began to look up. In 2020, the park service’s maintenance got a huge boost from the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act, signed by President Trump near the end of his first term. That act established the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund and authorized the transfer of $1.9 billion a year to the fund, drawing on proceeds from federal oil and gas leases, to pay for a long slate of conservation projects distributed among national parks and other public lands. The fund has injected $6.65 billion into the park service for about 180 projects, to fix roads and bridges, for example, and to replace water utilities, stabilize slopes and shorelines, and remove obsolete structures, among many other improvements.
The Outdoors Act’s five-year authorization ended with fiscal year 2025. A bill to reauthorize the Legacy Restoration Fund, called the America the Beautiful Act, awaits action in the Senate. Edward Stierli, the mid-Atlantic senior regional director at the National Parks Conservation Association, notes that the renewal bill has “really strong” bipartisan support. President Trump is said to support the renewal, and there are hopes among its supporters to have it enacted by July 4 of this year.
“There’s been so much progress that’s been made, such incredible work done” owing to the Legacy Restoration Fund, Stierli says. “Now’s not the time to stop.”
Another money infusion to the park service and to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) came in 2022 from the Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Biden. Through 2031, it allocated $250 million to ecosystem restoration projects and $250 million to climate resilience work at national park and BLM sites and directed another $200 million to deferred maintenance projects. Through 2030, it also sent $500 million to the park service to hire about 1,400 new employees. As of August 2024, the park service said it had spent about $210 million of the restoration money on projects, including those to reverse whitebark pine decline in the West, protect Hawaiian birds from avian malaria, and keep coral reefs alive, among several dozen other projects.
Then everything changed. First, on President Trump’s first day back in office in January 2025, he stopped all further funding under the Inflation Reduction Act with an executive order titled Unleashing American Energy. The order targeted federal regulations and programs that “impeded” exploration for domestic fossil energy sources and made clear the administration is shunning concerns about climate change. Park service staff registered the effects immediately. A landscape architect for the park service, Jones (all single names are pseudonyms), worked as a cultural resource specialist, advising park units on historic landscape preservation. After the executive order on energy (issued among a raft of others on day one), Jones began seeing “everything kind of grinding to a halt, as far as money coming in and the ability to do projects.” The order stopped projects that were as much as 90 percent finished, with research completed and construction documents ready. “If it had just a whiff of climate change or if it was going to benefit any sort of nontraditional resource, that stuff died almost instantly,” Jones says. “Almost all our work was on contract” to the private sector. Then, in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill officially rescinded an unspent $267 million from the park service in Inflation Reduction Act funds. Fewer than half of the new positions created by the Inflation Reduction Act were said to have been filled by that time.
One park service landscape architect, Smith, who manages design and construction on “big, transformative, high-dollar projects” for multiple parks in a regional office, recalls the optimism in the office in 2024. “The influx of money [meant] there was a lot happening at once,” Smith says. “And now, we look at where we are today in such a short amount of time. There are no funds. We’re not helping to conceive projects—we have very little of that work. Anything that was in design has paused, so we prioritize work that’s under construction.” Supervisors have reassigned managers of design projects to construction administration, Smith says. “And the projects that went on hold? We don’t have a clear understanding of how they would get un-paused or when they would come back online, or how that would happen.”
This January, Congress approved a park service budget for 2026 that cut the core construction budget by 49 percent, to $89 million, which Smith says is “devastating.”
The devastation extends to staffing. The park service has lost about 6,700 people, or about 30 percent of its 2024 head count, dropping the total to around 15,000 people, according to recent data from the federal Office of Personnel Management. This includes about 1,000 new hires who were fired in February 2025 and about 2,700 who retired early or voluntarily resigned because of the compulsory return to office or for other reasons. Among those to leave the park service since early 2025 are about 36 landscape architects, which brought their number down to 122 in the agency, though landscape architects may work for the park service under other designations. Thirty-two architects have also left, leaving 105 in the agency.
At one large national park, sudden staff departures caused havoc on a project to overhaul visitor lodging ready for construction, an effort worth tens of millions of dollars and several years in the works. A landscape architect on the project, Garcia, says two key design colleagues left voluntarily in late 2024, a few months before President Trump took office, but the positions hadn’t been filled when the president announced a hiring freeze. Voluntary early retirement offers prompted two other design managers on the project to retire from the Denver Service Center, the park service’s central management hub for design and construction. One was gone in just a few weeks, among many in the agency to take years of knowledge out the door, creating enormous challenges for the staff left behind. Garcia was stunned by the suddenness. “This whole hiring freeze is absolutely terrifying. It’s basically trying to create burnout.”
Other park service staff felt pushed out by the administration’s return-to-office order, which put them in untenable positions. In the park service’s Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance program (RTCA), some landscape architects had long worked remotely, traveling widely in their regions. Their job is to help localities that apply to the program, many of them far from national park sites, plan conservation and outdoor recreation projects for public benefit.
One landscape architect with RTCA for decades, Williams, loved working with town governments and residents in their region and had been fully remote since the pandemic. As the park service rushed to fulfill the president’s return-to-office order, it took a while to find an office for Williams to work from, but eventually located a desk in the nearest large city at a federal immigration agency field office. “I don’t want to spend my life commuting,” Williams says. “For a whole bunch of reasons, I was like, no. I’m not going to go there.” Williams took the retirement offer instead, earlier than planned. A landscape architect in another RTCA region, Roberts, left more reluctantly. “Honestly, I didn’t want to take the buyout,” Roberts says. The only reason they did was because their financial adviser, a close friend, said, “If you don’t and you get fired—that is, they tell you to be in Cleveland tomorrow, and you say, forget you—you’re fired and you lose health benefits as part of your retirement.” Roberts couldn’t afford to take that risk.
Davis, another landscape architect for RTCA, has hung on despite having to shift from remote work to driving more than 40 miles across a large metropolitan area to the nearest agency office. Their work took them to towns across a few states to work closely with local leaders and residents until a travel ban on trips over 50 miles meant reverting to virtual meetings. “That was disruptive,” Davis says, as was suddenly finding out, shortly after DOGE’s arrival, that the spending limit on their government-issued credit card had changed to $1. “So, no expenses, and no travel. I couldn’t even purchase workshop materials or office supplies.”
A more essential change at RTCA has been its underplaying of concepts that have been core to its mission to avoid provoking the administration. “We are a program that’s all about equity,” Davis says. “We’re used to finding projects based on areas of the highest need, and that has had to shift just because we can’t talk about equity,” or about diversity and inclusion. “Even words like ‘climate change’ or ‘climate resilience,’ we can’t say. We have to be very careful.” Those terms and others can’t appear in the applications communities complete to be considered for RTCA’s services or in the program’s review and rankings of applications. “None of that,” Davis says. “So, environmental justice? Forget about all those things. We have had to pivot and talk about, even very cautiously, just green infrastructure, or disaster resilience—or recovery. Even resilience they [administration officials] don’t like, right?” This puts more procedural burden on the already reduced staff but also on the communities that are trying to apply for grants, which are often already strained for resources.
The prohibition of efforts relating to diversity, equity, or inclusion came on day one of President Trump’s new term in an executive order titled Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs and Preferencing. DOGE was among the enforcers to give the order teeth. DOGE’s own database of contracts that it has terminated across the government includes dozens of entries representing terminations in the administration’s first few days of contracts for DEIA training (“A” for accessibility) of dozens of different contractors.
Among the contracts on DOGE’s kill list are several awarded by the park service’s Southeast Region to landscape architecture firms for producing cultural resource reports for park sites. The specialized reports serve as guides to preserving or modifying historic park assets. They provide physical inventories of sites and historical narratives, including narratives of the sort that the new regime finds unflattering to the nation and has ordered removed from public view in the parks, provoking strong objections by career park service employees to what they view as censorship.
The public data firm HigherGov has inventoried federal contracts canceled by DOGE. It shows that in May 2025, DHM Design, based in Denver, lost two contracts for cultural resource reports: one for part of Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi, valued at $79,000, and another for the Natchez Trace Parkway, valued at $259,400. WLA Studio, located in Athens, Georgia, lost four Southeast Region contracts for historic structure reports last year worth a combined $537,000, including one for a tailor shop at the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site in Tennessee. Elizabeth Sargent, FASLA, a historic landscape architect based in Charlottesville, Virginia, is also among those who have had park service contracts terminated by DOGE: four contract awards worth a total of about $771,000.
Of the landscape architects who lost contracts in the DOGE-led purges, none wished to comment for this story; all have other work proceeding normally with the park service. However, a person familiar with a few of the terminated contracts noted that although construction of the implicated projects was typically allowed to proceed, “any project that was perceived as cultural or might have, you know, anything related to African American history, or cultural history in general, was terminated. They’re continuing with construction projects but not with the studies.”
In the absence of protected opportunities to speak out, retired park service staff have stepped into the gap to advocate for the service and its people. Emily Thompson, a park service veteran who now heads a group of nearly 5,000 current and former park service employees called the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, says the removal of unvarnished historical material from the parks is coming from the highest levels of the administration and “certainly through the secretary’s office” at the Interior Department. Thompson says that many park service staff “are in a really tough position” of having to follow through on the removal orders.
A former director of the park service, Jonathan B. Jarvis, Honorary ASLA, who served from 2009 to 2017, also laments the dilemma park service employees face. Park staff are stuck “following orders under the fear of retaliation,” Jarvis wrote in February on Substack, describing the administration’s removal of interpretive displays on topics such as slavery, Native American history, and climate change from park sites. “Signs can always be put back up when this administration finally exits, but in the interim, millions of visitors will miss the honest, historically accurate, scholarly and scientifically based interpretation of our nation, its history, and nature.”
Olmsted’s original charge, that the National Park Service conserve its holdings “unimpaired” in perpetuity, has suffused its policy and operations over generations of employees who consider their work a calling, not least the landscape architects in its ranks. Smith, the regional design and construction manager, like others interviewed, voiced serious concerns about the future efficacy of landscape architects in sustaining the conservation standards the park service has long elevated. “We’ve had so much dismantling and eroding that it’s just degraded our ability to practice in the park service, and it’s degraded the quality of the services to the public,” Smith says. Just as worrying, they add, is the potential negative effect beyond the park service of compromising its professional requirements and expectations. “When you erode the profession at the governmental level,” Smith says, “it will have an impact on the entire profession over time.”