On Monday, Trump officially gutted two national monuments, both sacred to many Native Americans, by reducing the size of each by 1.5 million acres to open that acreage for development and mining.
This land was meant to be enjoyed by all Americans, not stripped for parts by the wealthy few. But Trump is rolling those promises back, shrinking these two monuments after slashing national park budgets and censoring historical and scientific exhibits on slavery, labor history, climate change, and more.
Our national park rangers are on the frontlines of the fight against these attacks on our public lands. One surprisingly powerful battle tactic in their arsenal? Unions.
We are working closely with the park rangers organizing the National Park Service, and they shared with us that the reduction of these monuments is a warning. A test case. And they are unionizing to keep it from happening again.
To understand why, we need to talk about what happened to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
The Bureau of Land Management is the federal agency in charge of caring for both monuments. In 2025, under the guise of national security, Trump denied union rights to BLM workers in the midst of multiple new union drives at the agency. Then the Trump administration slashed the agency’s budget and staffing, making it difficult for the remaining staff to effectively manage the land.
After gutting BLM worker protections, staff, and budget, Trump had the nerve to use the lack of staff and funding as a rationale for shrinking both national monuments by 90% each, totalling 3 million acres lost.
Trump said as much in his Presidential Proclamations announcing the reduction of the monuments: “Revising the Monument’s boundaries…will also account for practical limitations on the BLM’s and the USFS’s land management resources and funding.”
This is their playbook. Gut the agencies, blame the agencies for their lack of resources, and then gut them some more.
Rangers are organizing not just for a union contract, but because they know that union protections–like those against layoffs–also protect the parks. They know that unionized rangers have the best chance of protecting the parks from our collective worst nightmare–the loss of more public lands and national monuments.
So far, thousands of national park rangers from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite have joined unions during this organizing push, and this ranger-led movement is just getting started.
Here’s what one of those rangers shared with us:
“It feels like the attacks just keep coming. People in our own government said they wanted to traumatize us. They fired thousands of us without warning and illegally. They seek to censor our voices, to censor the truths about our shared history and the history of the Native people who have been here since time immemorial. Our budgets are constantly being cut while crucial funds are directed to vanity projects. The threat of losing public lands has always loomed in our minds. Now, with the massive shrinking of two national monuments, it feels like this terrifying reality is closer and closer. We cannot afford to lose because once these lands are gone, they might be gone forever.
Now is the time for all of us as park rangers to come together, to fight for each other, and fight for what the public has entrusted us to do. We believe that a strong park service is within reach and the best way for us to do that is to unionize.”
Right now, more rangers are preparing to spend their furlough time road-tripping from park to park, talking to their coworkers about unionizing and sharing organizing skills along the way. All they need is the resources to cover the basics–gas, meals, and lodging–along the way.
In Solidarity,
The Labor Force
Sources:
https://fortune.com/2026/07/14/trump-national-monuments-republican-conservation-democrat-development/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/13/trump-cuts-national-monuments-utah
https://www.npca.org/articles/11410-court-blocks-censorship-and-erasure-of-american-history-and-science-at
https://democracyforward.org/news/press-releases/examples-of-censorship-from-national-parks-conservation-association-et-al-v-department-of-the-interior-et-al/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/modifying-the-bears-ears-national-monument