Jessica Preston came to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area because she’s worried about the future.
“I feel like the country is going in a direction completely opposite of what America was founded on,” Preston said. “The administration we have now is making good on its promises to defund the parks and defund the government.”
Preston and her husband were among the approximately 70 who showed up at the recreation area’s visitor center in Boulder City on Saturday to protest, among other grievances, recent mass layoffs within the National Park Service.
Similar protests happened all around the country Saturday — including at other national parks such as Yellowstone, Joshua Tree and Yosemite — as people spoke out against President Donald Trump’s cuts to the park service and blasted Elon Musk, whom the president has installed as the head of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency.
Preston, a Boulder City resident, works as a hydrologist for Republic Services. She said she fears the Trump administration will attempt to sell off portions of America’s public lands.
“I value public lands,” Preston said. “I believe this administration will try to sell all of this off to the highest bidder or whoever their oligarch friends are. Public lands are America’s legacy for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
About 1,000 fired, reports say
The Associated Press reported in February that the Trump administration had fired about 1,000 newly hired park service workers. The firings, which weren’t publicly announced, were confirmed by Democratic senators and House members.
The AP then reported several days later that the Trump administration was restoring the jobs of dozens of fired park service employees and pledging to hire up to 7,700 seasonal positions this year, an increase from the 5,000 promised earlier in the week. That’s also higher than the three-year average of 6,350 seasonal workers. The park service numbers about 20,000 employees.
Meanwhile, park service employees have been anonymously crowdsourcing information about the number of layoffs at each park and destination. That information has been posted to social media, including to the @nationalparkdiaries Instagram account.
As of Tuesday, the park service employee group had reported 13 layoffs at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, six at Death Valley National Park and 11 at Utah’s Zion National Park.
The National Park Service did not respond to a message from the Review-Journal on Saturday.
The dozens who showed up for Saturday’s event in Boulder City said they think letting the federal employees go is a bad idea.
Many held signs. One read “PUBLIC LANDS = FREEDOM” while another said “PROTECT our PARKS.” At times, the group engaged in chants, including one that went, “Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go.”
Why protesters came out Saturday
Las Vegas resident Alison Gause, who said she likes to spend time on public lands, is worried about what’s happening at the federal level.
“This protest is in support of our public lands and the civil servants who study and protect them,” Gause said. “We’re here to bring attention to the wrongful terminations and to try to keep public lands in public hands. We don’t want any drilling on public lands. We don’t want the privatization of public lands.”
Organizer Rily Bellias said she moved to Las Vegas partly because of its access to a number of different national parks.
“I came here from North Carolina partly because you can get to so many different public land areas within a about a five-hour drive,” Bellias said. “I think the desert is a very special place. It would be sad to see any of these things go.”
Chuck Muth, a Republican strategist and president of Citizen Outreach, a Las Vegas conservative organization, told the Review-Journal he understands why some are upset at the federal downsizing, but that it’s necessary.
“Government spending has been bloated for a long time and Congress has done basically nothing about it,” Muth said. “There had to be a change. I understand how this can upset some, but I didn’t see any protests when people in the private sector were losing their jobs during COVID. Welcome to the real world.”
A group called the Resistance Rangers helped organize Saturday’s protests. The goal was for events to happen at each of the country’s over 400 national parks.
Contact Bryan Horwath at bhorwath@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BryanHorwath on X. The Associated Press contributed to this report.