Crater Lake National Park superintendent resigns in protest of ‘unconscionable’ staff cuts

Until last week, Kevin Heatley was the Crater Lake National Park superintendent. He’d worked in the private sector for much of his career, but for most of the last decade, he’s been in leadership positions with the federal government, including with the Bureau of Land Management. He had only taken the Park Service job in January, a move he made in anticipation of possible BLM cuts. But last week, he chose to resign, saying he could no longer be party to President Trump’s dismantling of the federal government. He told OPB that while park services will be affected, it was the impact on the physical and mental health of employees that he felt he could no longer be complicit in.

Heatley joins us to tell us more about his time at the helm of Oregon’s only national park and his hopes for federal government employees in the Trump administration.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Kevin Heatley spent most of his career in the private sector. Then, about a decade ago, he made the move to the federal government where he held a variety of leadership posts at the Bureau of Land Management and the Army Corps of Engineers. In January, he became the superintendent of Crater Lake National Park – that is, until last week when he announced that he was resigning. He said he could no longer be party to the dismantling of the federal government, and has been particularly focused on the impact that diminished staffing will have on the physical and mental well-being of employees. In response, Oregon Congresswoman Maxine Dexter sent a letter to the Department of Interior this morning, demanding answers to questions about workplace and visitor safety, and overall ecosystem health.

Kevin Heatley joins us now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.

Kevin Heatley: Thank you, Dave. Appreciate the opportunity to be on the show.

Miller: After working a variety of jobs in the Bureau of Land Management in the past, why did you want this job at Crater Lake?

Heatley: Well, I had taken the initiative to read Project 2025, about a year ago in April. I was working at the time in Washington D.C. for the Bureau of Land Management as a deputy chief in NEPA planning and decision support ...

Miller: National Environmental Policy Act?

Heatley: That’s correct. High profile position, working on policy, recognized immediately that headquarters staff would be targeted if Project 2025 came to fruition. So I started to look for alternative employment within the federal government. And the National Park Service, when Crater Lake became available, I did not hesitate to apply. I’d spent a lot of time at Crater Lake as a civilian. It’s iconic, it’s phenomenal, amazing place. And the National Park Service is a beloved agency that I really was excited to be a part of.

So I took the opportunity to move to Crater Lake when I had the honor of being selected, and thought that that would most likely be a refuge, and there would be minimal disruption of the National Park Service because it is so beloved. Unfortunately, that assumption was in error. And that’s how I ended up at Crater Lake.

Miller: You told the Washington Post, “I’m tired of waking up at three in the morning and not being able to fall back asleep because I’m concerned about how I’m going to navigate the latest staffing communique.” What’s an example of a staffing memo or directive that you would get that would keep you up at night?

Heatley: Oh, it’s constant within the federal government and within the National Park Service now. And I’m not slamming the National Park Service because senior leadership was caught off guard repeatedly. We’d get memos from Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that would indicate there was a hiring freeze. Or, for instance, the famous February 14 Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, where probationary employees were unceremoniously jettisoned under false pretenses. We’d get constant changes to what we could or couldn’t do with respect to personnel.

The biggest issue was the replacement or hiring of new permanent staff. We had people that had job offers out, important positions that we needed to fill, and those job offers were all rescinded. Seasonal hiring, for instance – we were all of a sudden told that the seasonal hires that had their job offers out, those job offers were rescinded. And then subsequently, after about a month or so, “oh, well now go and see if you can get those people again.” Well, a lot of those people went and found other jobs in the interim period. Crater Lake, for instance, has a very compressed season for tourism. We don’t usually have a lot of heavy tourism until May and then by September it’s starting to snow again. Well, now Crater Lake is a month-and-a-half behind in bringing on a lot of the seasonal staff, which has caused us to basically lose out on about a third of the season. And that’s not an acceptable model for how to run an organization.

Miller: When you say you lost out, meaning you cannot provide the services that you normally would because there are not staff there to provide them?

Heatley: Currently, Crater Lake is fully open. We have the services. There’s been some changes. For instance, we do not have the interpretive staff on yet. They’re supposed to start very, very soon. They would have been on in early May. And those are the people that lead the interpretive talks, the educational presentations. We’ve had to rely on volunteers for a lot of that to fill in. But current services are being provided.

The problem is it’s not sustainable, the workload, for the amount of people that we currently have, particularly with the permanent staff. You need to have, in any organization – and I’ve been in management for my entire career – some institutional resilience. You need to have the capability of someone else to step up if that other person suddenly becomes ill, retires or moves away, or, in the federal government now, gets that little RIF [Reduction in Force] notice and they’re out the door. So without that kind of built-in redundancy, without that capacity to step up and fill in, you’re at a disadvantage.

And the handwriting is on the wall. The train is still running on the tracks, but it’s not heading in the right direction.

Miller: What are your specific concerns or what about what this overall reduction in staffing could mean for staff themselves?

Heatley: Well again, the issue is not that we’re worried right now that we’re gonna all of a sudden be slammed and lose a bunch of staff. The problem is that we can’t recruit additional staff, we can’t add. And over the last 10 years or so, Crater Lake has seen a repeated flat budget, flat funding, which has reduced our capability to recruit and pull people in. If someone were to leave … right now, for instance, snow removal. Crater Lake is one of the snowiest places on the planet. I think this year we got over 36 feet of snow. This year it’ll be another two or three weeks before the roads are fully cleared to snow. And then in September, it’ll start snowing again. So right now, if we lose one plow operator, we will not be able to keep those roads open in the winter time, as we’ve done in the past and as we’re currently doing.

Our facility staff is in a situation now where routinely, per pay period, and that’s a two-week pay period, they’re routinely putting in 60 hours of overtime in order to meet the demand because we do not have enough staff. The administration has communicated that for every four people that leave, you can only replace one.

Miller: In a fully functional organization, I would put forward, if management makes certain decisions, the people below them are able to say “OK, I understand the hierarchy, but these are going to be the repercussions of your directives.” Did that exist in any way in the last five months? Was there anyone you could go to plead your case?

Heatley: [Laughs] No. I’m sorry to laugh about it. There was a lot of commiseration, but upper management in the National Park Service was kept in the dark. And a lot of these directives were coming from the Office of Personnel Management as to what we could or couldn’t do. We were caught off guard repeatedly. That nonsensical, every week you have to put in your five accomplishments for the week and then send them to some anonymous email not even in your chain of command. Your direct supervisor is the person who should be monitoring your performance. Performance plans were put on hold. And for four or five months now, those people at the National Park Service have no performance plans. You can’t run an organization without having your employees on some kind of performance standards, that they know their expectations of what they need to get accomplished, and the manager has a template by which to hold them accountable.

They didn’t like the language for diversity, equity and inclusion, so they put all the EPAPs [Employee Performance Appraisal Plans], basically canceled them all. All you needed to do was send out new language, it could have been inserted overnight and then that would have been rectified. But no, these amateurs have let it go on for four or five months, which destabilizes your workforce. So yeah, we did not have any kind of consistent chain of command that we could plead our case or indicate otherwise that this is not the way to go. There was obviously a lot of that that went on internally, but as to whether that reaches the decision makers or whether they cared, they’re anonymous, we didn’t know. We didn’t know who at DOGE was making these decisions, or Office of Personnel Management. We had no idea.

We did get a directive from the Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s office and we were told “keep the parks open.” At the same time, you’re not allowed to hire any people. And if people leave, you’re only allowed eventually to hire one for every four. But keep the parks open, that was the directive.

So, of course, what that does is stress out and burn out staff, because you’re doing more and more with less and less. And on top of that, you have this reduction in force hanging over everybody’s head. Nobody knew who was going to leave on all these buyout offers, or whether a reduction of force was coming a month ago, two weeks ago or two weeks from tomorrow.

So that instability is a big part of why that anxiety within the workforce started to escalate and why I had to walk away, because I cannot in good conscience manage an operation that I know is moving in the wrong direction. And we’re not being given the tools to manage it effectively. And most importantly, the employees that I’m responsible for are being put in harm’s way because of the stress. Quite frankly, just the stress itself will end up getting people killed because it has psychological and physiological impacts, and you cannot do that to your workforce without having that kind of a result.

Miller: Kevin Heatley, thanks very much for your time.

Heatley: Thank you, sir.

Miller: Kevin Heatley is now the former superintendent of Crater Lake National Park.

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