Of the half dozen parks with which I was employed as an administrator, invariably there was a healthy percentage of co-workers namely rangers who would utter “I can’t wait to get out of here” with the delusion that it is magically greener on some other side. The casual observer may query: “You’re in paradise and miserable. What gives? People would kill for your job!”
NPS life is tough on marriages and families. Pay is low for the front line park ranger comparatively. If you want to have a family you really feel the stress. Promotions are few, very competitive, arbitrary, often crony or agenda based, and can bring out the worst as fellow staffers “elbow” each other out of the way pressed by the reality of a career circling the drain. There is a veiled equation, or game that must be played in order to advance. Choose your loyalties carefully and hope the winds don’t shift. Work place conflicts can get nasty, tend to spin up fast and they linger. Many parks I’ve worked in create unnecessary positions due to managerial whims or hidden agendas that eat up the limited budget while vital positions go unfunded. Supervisory ranks are high in the unqualified, poorly trained and incompetent. There are a few top notch managers but of the many I have worked with, far too many were shameless opportunists painfully absent and already focused on their next advancement. The NPS is a small world, where everybody knows your business and reputations get broadcasted quickly and stick. It combines to create a toxic office culture concealed behind the idyllic back drop of log cabin entrance stations and happy seasonal rangers collecting fees and providing tours. The positive public opinion of the agency is carried on the backs of the young, naïve and idealistic “seasonal”.
NPS WASO (headquarters) struggles with an “inside the Beltway” DC identity crisis. This is where things really fall apart. The NPS is an anachronism struggling to find its place within an evolving “outsourced” Federal Government, the fast pace of modern technology, hyper consumerism, cost of living, and promotion practices dominated by 30 years of identity politics and cronyism. Let’s face it, even the best federal agencies are behind the curve in technology, project/program management practices, and leadership development. The National Park Service isn’t even on the grid and prides itself therein. The NPS tends to do things “its own way”, and seems to want to isolate itself from the Department of the Interior let alone other federal agencies and most critically the private sector’s “best practices” (leadership, technology, etc.) That initial rugged individualistic spirit that attracts people to the agency becomes a critical liability in Washington DC. There is almost a rebellious defiance. Those who come from parks seek only to stay a few years and with great haste return to the parks with the irony that while in DC they often help foster the glaring disconnect between HQ and the parks. The greatest fear is “getting stuck” in DC. The basic goal is “return to park paradise but with a juicy inflated DC based salary transferring with and often for a crony created position waiting”. Those who play it right are rewarded with that choice job in paradise where they fully intend to stay for years, even decades unchallenged slowing promotion potentials for others. The other percentage of the WASO workforce has never worked in a park, and lacks an accurate frame of reference to the core of the NPS culture. It doesn’t help that annual budgets for the NPS have been lean for decades. Poor budgets compounded by a disjointed, marginally committed, self-isolating culture fosters rank amateurism with an “anything goes” lack of accountability that, as a business model simply cannot tackle the mounting grave strategic issues that the NPS continues to face. The elephant in the room of course continues to be the news worthy ethics violations including sexual harassment. Headquarter offices are filled with the overpaid, idle and the aimless “executive/special assistants” (code word for either ethics violators secretly riding out their careers in comfort or victims of the latest political senior executive “purge”). A final blow for the NPS Washington DC office is the volume of congressionally mandated offshoot programs that are dumped in the Park Service’s lap, along with some internally conceived programs that have very little to do with the original core mission. Year-by-year it gets worse, including political agenda driven and/or pork nominations for new sites that continue to suck what’s left of the oxygen out of the fiscal room.
