Problems in the National Park Service
By 
I know a bunch of National Park Service workers, present and past, and they pretty much all back this up. Working for the NPS sucks. The agency is completely borked right now.
The group asked employees at agencies around the federal government questions based around three basic topics: Would they recommend their organization as a good place to work? How satisfied were they with their jobs? And how satisfied were they with their organization as a whole? The higher the agency’s engagement and satisfaction score, the more likely the employee intended to stay.
According to survey results, national parks ranked 371 out of 432 government agencies in 2022 – or in the bottom 15 percentile. Those numbers were essentially flat compared to 2021 and 2020 survey results.
Increasing employee morale at the NPS, which has suffered from under-resourcing for decades, has been a main objective of the agency’s director, Chuck Sams. During his confirmation hearings in 2021, he stated: “The one thing I’ve always learned in leadership is it’s the people that are most important,” he added, “And therefore helping to improve the morale, listening to the staff, the long-term staff, and figuring out exactly what needs to be done to support them out in the field in order to be the good interpreters they are, to be able to take care of the parks in an appropriate way.” But despite this sentiment, many park employees seem to have one foot out the door.
The biggest employee complaints pointed to an unsatisfying salary, a poor work-life balance, and a lack of workplace commitment to diversity. The park service’s best score was for mission matching, which ranked 187 out of 410 agencies.
One potential contributing factor to low employee morale could relate to the number of staff members that the park service currently employs. Between 2000 and 2010, the park service employed about 16,000 individuals every year. Since then, the agency has seen a 25% decline (with the exception of a brief surge in 2021), employing about 12,000 employees over the past decade despite surging park visitation.
It’s an agency where workers are forced to do work far above their pay station with no credit and no benefit. The NPS has a long history of harassment claims and things of this nature. NPS housing is of bad quality and very expensive and of course many NPS sites are in remote places and so providing housing is necessary to get any workers. The NPS is legendary for its ladder climbers who are far more concerned with rising in the agency than in actually managing the parks. Visitors are often nuts and there just isn’t enough funding from Congress to staff properly. Lots of people are leaving. It’s a bad time in an agency perhaps more beloved by the general public than any other government agency.