Some 350 people, on average, die each year in U.S. national parks. That number is small compared to the 300 million visitors who walk through park gates each year. But each death is a tragedy—and there could be more of them this year, thanks to understaffing, yanked funding, and a new Trump administration policy to withhold information from the public about deaths, injuries, and dangerous conditions in the parks.
According to the Washington Post, an internal memo that came to light in the past 2 weeks ordered park staff and other Interior Department employees not to "confirm deaths or details about severe injuries" to the public. The policy undercuts decades of transparency, according to seven current and former park rangers interviewed by the Washington Post. They told the newspaper "the policy marks a shift from the agency’s long-standing approach to release as much information as possible."
It's not beyond the realm of possibility to argue that this silence has already led to deaths. On June 12, a 72-year-old man succumbed to heat exposure on the Grand Canyon's South Kaibab Trail. In her Letters from an American newsletter, historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote that after that death "NPS employees wanted to warn other visitors, but the Interior Department did not release the information."
Four days later, on July 16, a couple in their late 60s died on the same trail, also from extreme heat.
National parks budget and staffing cuts
Understaffing could also make a visit to national parks more dangerous this year. There simply aren't as many trained people to respond to emergencies.
According to an analysis from the National Parks Conservation Association, the parks have lost 25% of their permanent staff since January 2025. That's some 4,000 rangers and other workers gone—"driven primarily by mass terminations, early retirements and deferred resignations, as well as a damaging and unnecessary reorganization," according to the nonprofit.
As worryingly, a drive to beautify Washington, D.C., in preparation for the country's 250th birthday celebrations, has rerouted money from crucial work in national parks to projects in the capital. According to a New York Times analysis of federal records, some $67 million in fees collected from visitors to the parks this year were used to improve Washington, D.C. ornamental fountains and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Our national parks already had a huge backlog of maintenance issues—to the tune of $23 billion at the end of 2024, the latest year for which data is available. Moving big passels of money to D.C. means a lot of crucial safety issues won't be addressed. These include, to name just three: a $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Colorado's Black Canyon at the Gunnison National Park (a “significant safety hazard for visitors,” according to official documents), repairs to crumbling walls on Skyline Drive (a hazard for motorists) at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and an initiative to replace decades-old fire trucks and ambulances used by the National Park Service, according to the New York Times.
The Atlantic did a dive into internal federal records and found more than 900 projects that were expected to be funded this year yet never received the money. In The Atlantic's accounting, that's a decrease in spending by $854 million (or 68%) in 2026 on projects in parks outside of Washington, D.C.
To add insult to injury, the projects that are being funded are far pricier than similar initiatives in recent years because they were marked as "urgent" and so were assigned under "no-bid" contracts. According to an analysis by the the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization, the average "urgent" contract during this term cost $290,281—roughly 11 times the average during Trump's first term ($25,356) and nearly eight times the Biden average ($38,156).
How to stay safe in national parks
To reiterate: The vast majority of visitors to U.S. national parks are unlikely to encounter any safety issues.
But this may be the year to buttonhole a ranger if you plan on getting out in nature. After all, we know that not all safety issues are getting into the park service's official, visitor-facing documents.
When you engage a ranger in conversation, ask about any issues you may encounter on hiking trails and campgrounds, or while on a rafting trip, climbing, or otherwise getting adventurous. We have no doubt you'll get solid advice from the parks' reliable employees.
Unfortunately, we may never know if the parks are getting less safe since official statistics are now being hidden from the public. Suzanne Rowan Kelleher of Forbes recently published an analysis of the mortality data available on the National Park Service website. She found that info to be woefully incomplete, with every cause of death after March 24, 2025, listed as “undetermined” and absolutely no deaths listed after Feb. 20 of this year.
But just because the current administration is saying there are no issues to worry about doesn't make it true. It's now up to us to go the extra mile to keep ourselves safe when visiting our splendid national parks. I'd say the risk is worth it, but it's always better to go in well-informed.