Firings cost Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area ranger his ‘dream job’

COULEE DAM – Sam Peterson moved into a little yellow house up the road from the headquarters of Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area last June, right after he finished his third year of teaching history at a school in Oregon.

He arrived here for a permanent job with the National Park Service, which runs the recreation area and manages more than 300 miles of public shoreline along the lake behind Grand Coulee Dam.

It was a career change he’d been wanting to make for a while. He’d gone to school to become a social studies teacher, but he’d always wanted to trade the classroom for a park.

“Being a park ranger was ultimately kind of my dream job,” Peterson said.

After a summer internship at Lewis and Clark National Historical Park in Astoria, he was ready to move almost anywhere for a permanent Park Service job.

He applied to parks all over the country. He doesn’t remember how many. Lake Roosevelt wasn’t a place he knew much about, but when they offered him a job – and a spot in employee housing – he took it.

School ended on a Friday. He started his job the next Monday. All summer long he led educational programs, roved through campgrounds talking with visitors and delivered safety messages. When a fire ban went into effect, he placed informational placards in fire pits.

His bosses liked him. He got a promotion to become the lead interpretive ranger in the park’s Kettle Falls district, a move he was planning for this spring. December and January were a planned furlough period for his existing job, so the 26-year-old took a temporary assignment in Plains, Georgia, at the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. He worked during the former president’s funeral.

The dream job was going well.

Then it was taken away.

On Feb. 14, Peterson became one of more than 1,000 people fired from the National Park Service in the Trump administration’s purging of federal ranks. The firing notice – which came from someone Peterson has never met at the Park Service regional office – cited performance as the reason for his firing.

It also put his housing in jeopardy. He, his wife and their dog, Rita, were still in the yellow house, a place reserved for government employees.

The park’s housing manager has told him he has until April 10 to find a new place to live.

“We’re on a countdown to homelessness,” Peterson said.

Peterson is part of an appeal filed this week in front of the Merit Systems Protection Board, an administrative body that reviews employee appeals.

The challenge is one of several filed by a group of Washington, D.C., law firms on behalf of terminated employees across the federal government.

Each appeal targets a specific department – the Department of the Interior, in Peterson’s case – but the argument is roughly the same. They say that agencies ignored mandatory procedures for actions that reduce their workforce, such as giving employees 60 days’ notice of layoffs, according to a website detailing the class-action appeals.

A decision in their favor could win the employees their jobs back. On Wednesday, in a separate case, the board issued a ruling that called for reinstating thousands of U.S. Department of Agriculture employees who had been fired.

Peterson said in an interview late last month that he’d take his job back if offered. He needs a job, for one thing, and working for the National Park Service is still a dream.

But he’s skeptical of the long-term prospects given the Trump administration’s focus on shrinking the federal government.

“It’s a gamble, and I’m worried,” Peterson said.

Staffing chaos

The firings across the federal government last month, part of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency Service’s efforts to shrink the federal government, targeted employees who were still in their job’s probationary term, which makes them easier to remove.

Probationary terms generally last a year or two, depending on the position, and they aren’t limited to new employees. In some cases, longtime staffers who took promotions or switched jobs were forced to begin new probations, leaving them vulnerable when the firing orders were made.

At agencies like the National Park Service, where seasonal employees sometimes try for years to land a permanent position, the firings are costing people coveted positions and throwing their livelihoods into limbo.

“It’s horrible,” said Graham Taylor, a senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “Real people’s lives are being terribly impacted.”

Peterson was the only person fired from Lake Roosevelt. The Washington State Standard reported that Mount Rainier and North Cascades national parks lost six employees each, while Olympic National Park lost five.

The firings are only one way in which the federal workforce is taking a hit. Before they started, the Trump administration offered employees a chance to resign in exchange for pay through September. The National Parks Conservation Association believes that more than 700 park employees took that offer.

Before that, Trump signed an executive order that froze federal hiring, blocking agencies from filling open jobs. The order also revoked job offers that came with a start date later than Feb. 8.

Among the open positions at Lake Roosevelt is the top job. The recreation area has been without a permanent superintendent for more than a year, following longtime chief Dan Foster’s retirement in December 2023.

Interim superintendents filled in while the Park Service searched for a permanent replacement.

Multiple sources said they were told that a candidate was chosen for the superintendent post by the end of 2024, and that they had expected the person would take over in February or March.

Peterson said he was told a superintendent was hired before he went to Georgia in December. Andy Dunau, the former executive director of the Lake Roosevelt Forum, said his group had started making plans for introducing the superintendent at public meetings.

But the hire was never announced publicly, and the person never arrived.

The National Park Service declined to answer questions about the hiring process for the superintendent position.

The vacancy forces others to take on additional administrative responsibilities there, and Dunau said it leaves a leadership vacuum.

“In terms of planning and management, the superintendent provides the overall direction,” Dunau said. “If you don’t have a superintendent, you’re basically holding things as-is into the future.”

More pressing, Dunau said, is the park’s need for seasonal staff.

The national recreation area includes the shoreline, campgrounds and boat ramps from Grand Coulee Dam to where Onion Creek dumps into the lake, about 13 miles south of the Canadian border. It was created after the completion of Grand Coulee Dam in 1946, and it was first called the Coulee Dam National Recreation area.

Recreation area staffers manage 22 boat launches, 26 campgrounds, one visitor center and beach facilities scattered throughout the lake, according to Park Service documents. The park draws more than 1 million visitors each year.

About 20 seasonal employees are hired each year to help manage that visitation.

“From maintaining bathrooms, campgrounds, boat ramps,” Dunau said, “that whole user experience, visitor experience really depends on those seasonal employees.”

After an initial freeze on seasonal hiring, the Park Service has started hiring some seasonal jobs. At least two maintenance positions for Lake Roosevelt were available last week on USAJobs.com, the government’s job board.

A Park Service spokesperson said in a statement that the agency is hiring seasonal workers “to continue enhancing the visitor experience as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management. We are focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks.”

Peterson worked in the park’s interpretation division, which leads educational programs, communicates with visitors and works with volunteers and outside groups.

“Every day felt like when you go to school and you’re going on a field trip,” Peterson said. “That’s literally what every day felt like for me.”

Typically, the division has nine staffers. After Peterson’s departure, it’s down to three. He said it does typically get a few seasonal employees, but it will still struggle with only a third of its permanent workforce.

The division runs the park’s only visitor center, at Fort Spokane. Limited staffing could mean severe limitations on the center’s hours when it opens for the summer season, Peterson said. He and two of his co-workers had planned to rotate shifts at the center, and to try to have it open four or five days a week.

Without him, that plan seems shaky.

“You can’t really have a visitor center open with only one person there to manage it,” he said.

Uncertain future

Even before the firing, the actions of the Trump Administration put Peterson in limbo.

The hiring freeze made his promotion uncertain. He and his supervisors had arranged for him to get a paid move to Kettle Falls, which required them to push back his start date. Because it was set to start after Feb. 8, the promotion ended up being put on hold indefinitely.

A few weeks later, as he and his supervisors were still sorting out plans for the new job, he was fired.

In some ways, he’s glad he hadn’t started the new job. It may have been all for naught, since he could have still been subject to the firing of probationary employees.

Now he and his wife, a teacher at Lake Roosevelt Junior/Senior High School, are trying to figure out what comes next. And where they’re going to live.

Permanent Park Service employees at Lake Roosevelt don’t normally stay in employee housing long-term. The agency manages a number of houses for seasonal employees. Two of them are next door to Peterson’s, just down the road from the park’s headquarters.

The house Peterson and his wife live in wasn’t being used when he took the job, so he was able to use it for what the Park Service refers to as “soft landing” housing – a place to stay while they searched for more permanent housing.

Peterson said searching for rentals in the area around Grand Coulee Dam was tough, particularly with a dog. The few places they found that could have worked were either well out of their price range or in poor shape.

“We just couldn’t find anything,” Peterson said.

During the search, they checked in with the park’s housing manager often. They were always told they were free to stay in the house longer, that there wasn’t anyone else who needed it. Then, when Peterson was offered the promotion to a post in Kettle Falls, they started planning for a move there instead.

Without a Park Service job, there’s no reason for them to move there, nor is there much of a reason for Peterson to stay in Coulee Dam.

“We were really only here because of my job with the Park Service,” he said.

Since his firing, he’s been looking for new jobs. He had an interview on Monday for a position back in Oregon.

If he got it, he’d move there on his own. His wife would move in with a friend and finish the school year. That’s the clearest plan they have so far.

“If I don’t get it, we literally don’t know what we’re going to do here,” he said.