February is the heart of prime visitation season for South Florida’s national parks: Everglades, Biscayne, Big Cypress, and Dry Tortugas.
Just as they’re getting swamped by tourists, the Trump Administration has arbitrarily fired 20 staffers as part of a nationwide effort, the president says, to streamline government.
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WATCH HERE“This country’s gotten bloated and fat and disgusting,” Trump said at his cabinet meeting Wednesday.
“It came out of thin air, it didn’t even seem like it was real, I was in disbelief,” said Yosselin Aparicio, who was fired from her position with the National Park Service. “I was shocked, I was very shocked.”
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After three years as an intern and just a few weeks short of a year into her job helping to manage the South Florida national parks, Aparicio was suddenly laid off, part of Elon Musk’s sweeping cuts with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“I want to stay positive, it’s really, really hard,” Aparicio said.
“It was definitely a feeling of hopelessness,” said Brier Ryver, who was a ranger at the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge near Tampa.
Like Aparicio, Ryver was fired simply because she was still in her probationary period, not because of her job performance.
“I felt a deep sense of pride in that work, and I was excited to work with the Fish and Wildlife Service for my whole entire career,” Ryver said. “I was dedicated to that service of the American public alongside my work with wildlife to connect people to it.”
On Valentine’s Day, Musk’s team fired 2,300 probationary employees at the United States Department of the Interior, which controls the national parks and the wildlife refuges.
“If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt, that’s why it has to be done,” Musk said on Wednesday.
“There’s not really any saving going on,” Aparicio said.
Her point is that even if they laid off the entire government workforce, it would only save about four percent of the federal budget. Parks employees, especially, make modest salaries at best. No one goes into that work to get wealthy.
“We do it because we have a passion for it,” Aparicio said.
The parks were already understaffed and underfunded, and the layoffs exacerbated that situation.
“Are they going to continue to be able to serve the American public and preserve and conserve the wildlife and habitat for the future?” Ryvver wonders.
Like Ryver, Aparicio felt like she had found her calling.
“I felt so much pride, I felt like I wore that hat, I did everything in the best interest of the American public, not even just the people that are American, but international visitors we have every day from the entire world that come to see our parks,” Aparicio said.
Each of those women is hoping to someday get their jobs back, that perhaps a court will rule that their firings were illegal, or maybe Congress will get involved and reinstate the laid-off employees. In the meantime, though, they are shifting gears and searching for new careers.
