Ben Shapiro downplays cuts to national park workers: “You can cut all those people by just having an automatic parking meter”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the February 19, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show 

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Now, the sort of idea that the national parks are somehow going to be unworkable if they have a couple fewer employees, like a thousand employ — you're talking about on average, by the way, they just said 428, 428 national parks and areas under the governance of this particular agency. A thousand employees cut. That's two. Like, two employees per national park. OK, if you're just gonna average it out. So, supposedly, this is going to mean the trash will pile up and restrooms won't be cleaned, and maintenance problems will grow, and guided tours will be cut back or canceled. And they say public safety will be at risk. No. I'm sorry. No.

So first of all, they do this every time there's a government shutdown. So there have been several government shutdowns over the course of the last decade. And every single time there is some dumbass story about how you can't visit the World War II memorial because it's been shut down. Barack Obama famously would do this. Every time there's a government shutdown, he would put out a bunch of pylons around the World War II memorial and say, you can't walk here because of the federal government shutdown. And be like, well, why can't I walk there? It's literally just statuary. Why can't I just walk through this area where there are statues? Like, if I go visit the Vietnam War Memorial, which is a giant wall, why exactly do I need federal employees there? Why can't I just walk over there? What exactly is the problem? And by the way, if you are a regular visitor to national parks, and I've gone to several national parks with my kids and with my wife — when you go to a national park, the interface that you have with the employees at the national park, unless you're taking a guided tour, is typically you paying for parking at the opening.

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So first of all, you can cut all those people by just having an automatic parking meter like every other parking lot in America, which has had an automatic parking meter since 1972. You don't actually need I mean, like, I like those people. They're nice people. But you don't actually need those people standing there and telling you it's $5 to enter the national park to go to the Everglades or something. So this idea that you're talking about, like, a wildly staffed, like, deeply staffed agency at the national parks, and you must shut down the entire — you have to shut down hundreds of acres because you don't have the dude who's taking the parking ticket at the front, that's an absurdity. That is ridiculous.

The Washington Post reports on the actual impacts of the cuts to national parks staff:

At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.

The wait to enter Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park this past weekend was twice as long as usual after the administration let go four employees who worked at the south entrance, where roughly 90 percent of the park’s nearly 5 million annual visitors pass through.

And at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, last week’s widespread layoffs gutted the team that managed reservations for renting historic farmhouses. Visitors received notifications that their reservations had been canceled indefinitely.

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Yosemite, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island, has hundreds of locked buildings and gates. Sometimes visitors get locked inside vault toilets or restrooms. Sometimes employees get locked out of their houses in the middle of the night.

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Several other fired employees at the Grand Canyon were working to replace a 12.5-mile pipeline that provides water for all facilities on the park’s South Rim, including some shower and laundry facilities, Landahl said. The pipeline was built in the 1960s and “experiences frequent failures,” according to the park’s website, with more than 85 major breaks since 2010.