Olek Chmura’s job was to clean the facilities, including the toilets, at Yosemite National Park in California – one of America’s most visited tourist attractions.
That was, until last Friday afternoon when an email landed in his inbox, from a person he had never heard of, notifying him that his position had been terminated.
Olek is one of about 1,000 newly hired National Park Service employees to be fired suddenly. They are the latest victims of Elon Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach to national government.
“I’m traumatised,” Olek says.
“Why am I a target? I don’t make that much money, I make around $40,000 (£32,000) a year, I can’t even afford to live in the local community, it’s like, why me? Why am I the fat?
“I chose to come serve the American people and the international community, because I truly believe that our national parks are one of America’s best ideas.”
Elon Musk is seemingly instituting a similar scheme of radical cost-cutting and job-slashing through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that he has executed in his private companies like X and Tesla.
I ask what Olek would say to Musk if he had the opportunity.
“I’d like to tell him, come look at my bathrooms here and tell me if I’m essential or not,” he says.
“I cleaned these toilets, armed with nothing but a putty knife and a pumice stone.”
National Parks are considered by many to be America’s crown jewels. More than 300 million people each year visit parks across the United States, like Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon, to appreciate the stunning views and historic sites.
But beauty has offered no protection to the brutal job cuts being rolled out across national government. A further 3,400 workers at the US Forest Service have also been fired.
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Existing workers in some of America’s 63 national parks are warning that the job losses could be catastrophic for the parks’ operations and the safety of staff and visitors.
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Danielle Schell and her husband Christopher are visiting Yosemite with their children, nine-year-old Cairo and Dakari, six. They are taking pictures of the valley from the tunnel view outlook.
“I’m crestfallen,” says Christopher, an urban ecologist and professor at the University of California.
“I think the folks that are making the cuts certainly aren’t the ones that are coming here. If you see what we see, it’s really hard to make the cuts because it just equates to money. But there is no money that can replace this,” he says, gesturing to the vista.
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Danielle says the cuts are short-sighted. “The discouraging thing is trying to explain to your kids why the billionaires don’t see it from our perspective as everyday people,” she says.
“How do you convince people, that don’t understand, that this matters? And that we’re actually doing ourselves a disservice when we think these greenspaces are not a part of our own lives.”
But others disagree. Steve Giacolini is visiting the park with his son and is a supporter of Elon Musk’s new role in government.
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“I’m all for what Elon Musk is doing. He’s the right man for the job,” he says.
“There’s a huge amount of waste and it’s been going on for decades, it’s horrible. He may go through all these agencies, find what he thinks needs to be cut and then the position will be gone and at least we will have saved billions of dollars.
“But I do think when it comes to cuts that agencies like the National Park Service should be last.”
But there is – seemingly – no order to these cuts and critics would say no rhyme or reason to who stays and who goes, only the promise that there’s more to come.
