Unless Congress can agree on a stopgap funding measure, the federal government will shut down on Wednesday, October 1, 2025.
During a shutdown, limited federal services deemed “essential” continue. Oftentimes, that includes public safety-related services like air traffic control, power grid maintenance, and law enforcement. Some programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, are not subject to annual appropriations, and are considered “mandatory.” Those also continue during a shutdown.
Normally, national parks, which are overseen by the Department of the Interior, close during a government shutdown. During the first Trump administration, however, parks stayed open with drastically reduced staffing levels, or no staff at all. This led to overflowing trash and pit toilets, illegal off-roading, as well as ecological damage to sensitive landscapes.
“There’s simply no way to protect the natural resources, protect the wildlife, and protect the visitors without staff,” said Aaron Weiss, the Deputy Director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities.
He said it’s not yet clear whether parks will stay open again, if a shutdown occurs.
Outside of national parks, other heavily used public lands, managed by agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service will also see impacts. There likely won’t be employees to take out the trash at trailheads, or to clean pit toilets at campsites.
“I think if there is a government shutdown, we need to really— as people on both sides of the aisle have said—defer to the locals, right?” said Will Roush, executive director of Carbondale-based advocacy nonprofit Wilderness Workshop. “Let the local land managers decide what's best for the local public lands in the case of a shutdown. And don't impose top-down, politically motivated actions that can be detrimental to public lands and local communities.”
“It creates unbelievable pressure on these landscapes that we all love,” Weiss said. “Places like Maroon Bells, where last we checked, there are like two rangers covering that entire area for all of those thousands of visitors that go there every month.”
The Maroon Bells, which see heavy traffic during fall for leaf-peeping, are located in the White River National Forest near Aspen, Colorado. The Forest has not yet responded to a request for comment on staffing levels and contingency plans for a government shutdown.
A memo from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, obtained by Politico, directs agencies to go ahead with mass-firings should the government shutdown occur. But according to Weiss, layoffs for land managers may be inevitable.
“Even more park managers are land managers and scientists across the West are about to lose their jobs, whether or not the government shuts down,” Weiss said.
“A government shutdown is one thing, additional mass firings is just making an already bad situation worse,” said Roush.
According to online outlet Government Executive, the Department of the Interior is planning another round of layoffs in mid-October, regardless of a government shutdown. The agency cut over 2,000 employees in February, and including buyouts and early retirement, lost about 11% of its total workforce since Donald Trump took office, according to Politico.
Weiss said these actions connect to a previous fight over the nation’s budget, when two contentious provisions to sell-off public land as part of the reconciliation process received massive public backlash.
“What we’re seeing them do is simply starve our lands from the management that they need in order to exist and thrive,” he said. “Once they’ve done that, once they break public lands, then inevitably they'll pivot to, ‘well, we can’t afford to manage our lands, so we have to sell them off.’”
But cutting staff at the Department of the Interior could have an adverse effect on the Trump administration’s stated goals of “unleashing American energy.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas conducts a quarterly survey of the energy sector, and the most recent report, released this week, indicates that oil and gas activity declined slightly. Oil and gas industry insiders expressed displeasure with the Trump administration’s “day to day” changes to energy policy.
“The noise and chaos is deafening!” wrote one respondent. “Who wants to make a business decision in this unstable environment?”
“The uncertainty from the administration’s policies has put a damper on all investment in the oilpatch,” said another. “Those who can are running for the exits.”
“Life is long, and the sword being wielded against the renewables industry right now will likely boomerang back in 3.5 years against traditional energy which will find itself facing harsher methane penalties, permitting restrictions, crazy environmental reviews and other lawfare tactics,” wrote a third.
Weiss pointed out that staffing cuts could hurt the industry even further, especially those looking to lease BLM land for oil and gas.
“You need the folks with the experience not only to sign that paperwork, to do those reviews, but to do them in the right way so they hold up in court,” he said. “So yeah, there is a world in which DOGE comes in and cuts so much that the industry—that is counting on the Trump administration to give them everything they want—doesn't end up getting that because there is simply a non-functional government on all fronts.”
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
