The Interior Department is no longer planning for a reduction in force, according to its top official, after divulging plans to lay off thousands of employees last fall.
The department, earlier this month, gave employees a third opportunity to accept voluntary incentives to leave their jobs or retire early.
“There’s no plans for RIFs, and we’ve just completed a buyout,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told members of the House Appropriations Committee on Monday. “The buyout, the early retirement, if you want to call it that, was offered to people primarily that weren’t offered it last year.”
Last October, the Interior Department told a federal court in San Francisco that it planned to eliminate more than 2,000 positions across its headquarters, agencies and bureaus throughout the country. Department officials told the court that the reduction in force was not related to the 43-day government shutdown, but happened to coincide with it.
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The court blocked the Trump administration from carrying out those layoffs, and Congress passed a stopgap spending bill that put governmentwide layoffs on hold for three months. Even though those layoff protections have expired, most agencies have rescinded the RIF notices they sent last fall.
In a comprehensive spending package for fiscal 2026, Congress rejected the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the National Park Service, and required agency leadership to maintain adequate staffing levels to carry out the agency’s statutory obligations.
Lawmakers also included language requiring the Interior Department to give Congress advanced notice of any major reorganization or significant cuts to its workforce.
The National Park Service lost about 25% of its workforce last year.
The full committee’s ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), said these “guardrails” were added to the FY 2026 spending deal on a bipartisan basis.
“What is the reason Congress so roundly rejected the proposed cuts last year? Quite simply, Mr. Secretary, our national parks remain extraordinarily popular,” DeLauro said.
Burgum told the subcommittee on interior, environment, and related agencies that his priority for the National Park Service workforce is filling public-facing positions.
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“The first question we need to ask is not just how many people are in the National Park staffing total, but how many of those people actually work in a park?” he told lawmakers.
Burgum said that some NPS employees were hired to work remotely under the Biden administration, but were not in “citizen-facing roles.”
“They were not only not working in a park, we couldn’t even find out which park or National Park historic site they were attached to,” Burgum said.
The department also centralized some of its back-office functions.
“We need less people at districts, regions, service centers, headquarters, etc.,” Burgum said. “We need people actually in the parks.”
The Trump administration, as part of its fiscal 2027 budget request, is looking to merge the Interior Department’s wildland firefighting programs and personnel with those of the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service.
The final FY 2026 Interior appropriations bill directed USDA and the Interior Department to hire an outside group to conduct a study on the feasibility of consolidation.
But in the meantime, the Interior Department recently proceeded with plans to consolidate all of its wildland firefighting personnel and programs.
Burgum said the department’s FY 2027 budget proposal reflects these reassignments.
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“They will still have a National Park uniform. They’ll still be fighting fires, but that may be where you’re seeing some of these dramatic percentages that you’re describing — it’s a transfer, it’s an inter-transfer within the budget, as opposed to a dramatic cut,” Burgum said.
This is a developing story and will be updated
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