National Parks Traveler

The National Park Service has a toxic problem that no one wants to talk about, and that’s the problem.

Across the agency there may be hundreds, possibly many hundreds, of employees claiming they’ve endured some form of harassment, discrimination, or retaliation. Many tell a compelling story. Others seem less clear-cut. But across the board, proving those cases and achieving a satisfactory outcome for all involved is incredibly difficult.

That’s not to say these claims don’t represent real problems. But the bigger problem is the Park Service continues to fail to get a handle on workplace issues ranging from bullying to discrimination to sexual assault.

Why is that?

Investigations through the years by both the Interior Department and the National Park Service have underscored serious workplace shortcomings, sometimes detailing shocking levels of disfunction, misbehavior, ethical missteps, and even criminal actions.

“Clearly, there has been sexual harassment, intimidation, retaliation within the Service, and that is not in keeping of the traditions of the fine Service itself," then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told reporters in 2017 in the wake of a high-profile scandal at Grand Canyon National Park.

Zinke was not the first or last to promise reform. He vowed to take "real action" and stated that zero tolerance would no longer be "an empty phrase." And yet, neither the Park Service nor its parent Cabinet department appears to have rooted out the drivers and alleged bad actors that perpetuate the issues.

In recent months the Traveler has heard from employees — female and male — who have said they were reprimanded, discriminated against, passed over for promotions, or placed on years of administrative leave when they raised concerns about how superiors were handling policy matters or even when they complained about their own workplace conditions or experiences. Those discussions have included allegations of sexual assault and harassment, race and gender discrimination, mental abuse, and bullying.

A Park Service employee who asked not to be identified because she doesn’t want to endure further ostracism in her park said that she has “reported, and other women have reported, the mismanagement, almost like deliberate sabotage, to harm and push out people who come forward and tell the truth about things, bad behaviors by other employees who are protected. And then the efforts that go to ruin those people that would come forward and tell the truth, and then those who support them also being retaliated against.”

At the same time, an overarching dilemma is that the Park Service has an approach to dealing with allegations that can penalize superiors before any wrongs are proven, two senior Park Service veterans independently told the Traveler.

“The barrier to claiming harassment is really low. [Equal Employment Opportunity claims] aren’t much higher,” said Bob Krumenaker, who recently retired after 40 years with the Park Service, most recently as Big Bend National Park’s superintendent.

“Anybody that doesn’t like something in how they are supervised can start the system rolling. … I’m not saying there isn’t harassment out there. What I’m saying is that we’ve gotten bogged down in the ‘he said-she said’ disagreements and can’t root out the true problems as readily as we should be able to.”

The other long-tenured, still-working Park Service employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing the agency’s process, said bluntly, “There is no repercussion for employees filing false claims against supervisors. They can pull the pin on the grenade and sit back and watch and laugh.”

How Bad Are Things?

Park Service data indicate a large majority of complaints are not upheld. According to the agency’s 2023 Work Environment Risk Report, harassment allegations in recent years have ranged from 292 in 2019 to 206 in 2022. Of the 2019 cases, 41 concluded with findings of harassment, and of the 2022 cases just 18 were found to have merit.

What those numbers don’t indicate is how many employees didn’t bring complaints because they felt the system was rigged against them, because they worried about retaliation, or because of the personal stress of enduring a possibly years-long ordeal. The Traveler has learned in employee interviews across the country about a big obstacle that often stymies investigations and prevents many problems from even getting reported: a culture of fear.

And while the agency has a policy to take “immediate and appropriate corrective action, including appropriate disciplinary action, to eliminate harassing conduct regardless of whether the conduct rises to the level of a violation of law,” the ever-present challenge in such cases is determining whether there really is harassment in play or whether there’s a disgruntled employee.

While then-Park Service Director P. Dan Smith in 2018 issued Director’s Order 16e and its accompanying Reference Manual to, in theory, rapidly address allegations of harassment, the process has turned into something of a Gordian Knot for both park managers and employees. Managers can be unfairly accused before the facts are unearthed, while employees can face a seemingly endless process to prove their cases.

Nothing prohibits an employee from filing repeatedly, either, even when their claims are not upheld.  Does this mean that harassment isn’t being addressed?  Or does it mean that unhappy employees can use the system to get back at managers they don’t like?  Maybe both.

Again, the process might be complicit, with employees who file complaints facing a procedural gauntlet that could literally drag out for years.

If the employee isn’t satisfied with the investigation triggered by a 16e complaint, they can then file an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaint. The 16e process starts out informally where the Park Service tries to resolve the issue without excessive complication. The process — which does not “replace, substitute, or otherwise satisfy the separate obligations of an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint, negotiated or administrative grievance, or other complaint process” — involves several layers of paperwork as well as several “anti-harassment points of contact,” which are managers designated at parks and regional offices to report and investigate the complaints.

Complaints can move between those points of contact, who themselves can be the subject of complaints, something that further can complicate the process. And it’s up to those points of contact to say whether they have any conflicts of interest in the matter.

But the employee also can pursue a formal complaint, in which case the agency usually hires a contract investigator. While there often are attempts to mediate a settlement, ultimately the Park Service decides. If the employee doesn’t agree with that outcome, they can appeal to Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which works to protect workers against partisan political and other prohibited personnel practices, or file a lawsuit. However, the MSPB’s backlog is so long it can take years to get a resolution.

The Fear Factor

The fear factor was a repeated theme in employee conversations with the Traveler about reluctance to speak out or file harassment complaints.

Workers portrayed an environment that does not welcome dissent, challenge, or complaints. Compounding that is a reluctance by employees and those who could confirm allegations to come forward. The Traveler, which has no way to assess the legitmacy of the complaints, is withholding names and not revealing telling details of the incidents because of the retaliation anxiety employees voiced.

These employees describe their fears of reprisal and related stress that some tie to mental breakdowns. In addition, some allege that senior managers either overlooked or manipulated investigations into their cases. Female employees were told bringing complaints would derail their careers.

But undercutting efforts in recent years to get to the root of the problem, the Traveler was told, is that investigators struggled to get employees to go on the record, even as managers were minimizing the problems or even blocked research into them.

A planned investigation into whether the Park Service might have a higher suicide rate than the general population was derailed by stonewalling.

“I thought that I couldn't make better headway on investigating the suicide rate than on the sexual harassment, because I already knew that they were burying that. … I found the same thing was true about suicide,” the Traveler was told by the individual who investigated the problems but didn’t want to discuss them on the record because it might invite criticism and personal attacks.

Maschelle Zia said she was fired from her job as deputy chief of facilities at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area while on extended sick leave stemming from on-the-job harassment. Since then, she has been leading a one-woman campaign to urge top Interior Department officials to do something, and has recently voiced a series of provocative accusations regarding employee cases and the Park Service managers she maintains are responsible.

In March 2023 she met with Shannon Estenoz, the assistant Interior Department secretary who oversees the Park Service, and Park Service Director Chuck Sams to discuss what she sees as harassment problems that are not being addressed.

Top Interior Department officials, while declining to discuss specific claims or the outcome of her meeting with Sams and Estenoz, say the allegations Zia raised are not being overlooked or minimalized.

“The allegations raised in these videos were initially brought to Interior Department leadership in January 2023. Since then, department and National Park Service leadership have made themselves available and engaged with the speaker in the video, survivors, family members and others involved in these claims, though those discussions are mischaracterized in the videos,” an Interior spokesperson told the Traveler in an email. “The department has thoroughly reviewed and will continue to thoroughly review any claim against current employees and take any appropriate action. Our commitment to the safety of our employees and the public is unwavering.”

What Is Being Done?

Paul Berkowitz spent more than three decades with the Park Service, retiring as a supervisory special agent after investigating a wide range of cases, from racism to criminal behavior. He blamed the ongoing workplace issues on the agency’s culture.

“You have an underlying cultural problem in the agency of allegiance to the agency at the expense of integrity,” Berkowitz said. “But it's structural, the decentralized nature of the organization, that everything is kind of compartmentalized. …They're terrible at taking a historical perspective. You can look back at all of these, these incidents going back and back and back and back. Every time it happens, they react as if this is a new and anomalous incident.”

A current Park Service ranger of more than two decades who went through a years-long ordeal trying to seek justice after saying they were sexually assaulted on the job said the problems exist because in some parks there’s no real oversight and individuals can control the dialogue.

“They want to keep their positions of power and control over the Park Service,” they said. “And there isn't really oversight, even when the OIG [Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General] gets called in. They did do well with some of the Grand Canyon stuff, but many times those OIG agents are working directly with the same managers who then kind of influence their investigations or their opinions of what's going on. Narratives will be written like, ‘Oh, these people are unreliable, they're just a whiner or they didn't get the job they wanted’ or something else to kind of muddy the waters.”

The sordid story that in 2016 floated up from the grottos and beaches along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon was not the first — or the last — in the Park Service involving alleged sexual harassment and discrimination and misogynistic behavior. 

• A 2017 employee survey conducted by the Park Service found that 40 percent of the Park Service workforce had been the victim of sexual harassment, intimidation, or discrimination. 
• The Voices Tour, a series of web-meetings and live interviews with more than 1,200 Park Service employees to uncover the extent of harassment and discrimination across the agency that was facilitated by NPS employees from throughout the park system, was launched late in 2017 and carried over into 2018. The resulting report found employees feared retribution if they spoke out and doubted the sessions would lead to meaningful change. One Voices Tour facilitator also told the Traveler that the survey data had been manipulated (ironically) to make the harassment problem seem even worse than it actually is.”
• A handful of months after Secretary Zinke said he intended to “root out this virus,” another DOI Office of Inspector General investigation found that Grand Canyon continued to be plagued by harassment issues.

The Grand Canyon episode took a letter to then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to gain the Park Service’s attention despite years of sexual harassment complaints. That letter, sent by 13 current and former Grand Canyon employees, charged that events within the park’s River District "demonstrated evidence of 'discrimination, retaliation, and a sexually hostile work environment.'”

An ensuing investigation by the OIG detailed a tawdry list of inappropriate behavior, from male employees taking photographs up under a female co-worker's dress and groping female workers to female workers dancing provocatively and bringing a drinking straw "shaped like a penis and testicles" to river parties. 

The OIG’s report said an internal investigation by Grand Canyon staff was "insufficient and incomplete;" that the park official responsible for possibly being too harsh in disciplining two female employees for their dancing and the straw incident felt pressured by Grand Canyon Superintendent Dave Uberuaga to take action against them; and that male and female employees received unequal discipline.

The investigation also faulted park officials for taking little action despite years of complaints about the misbehavior.

A Catch-22

Reform-minded individuals could find themselves subjected to unfounded claims.

In a bizarre twist that underscored the difficulties of dealing with harassment complaints, Christine Lehnertz, whom former Park Service Director Jarvis had chosen to replace Uberuaga and rid the park of the issues, was removed in the fall of 2018 for several months when a complaint accused her of fostering a hostile work environment, bullying and retaliation against senior staff, “particularly male leaders,” and wasting nearly $200,000. OIG investigators ultimately deemed the complaint unfounded, and Lehnertz was allowed to return to Grand Canyon as superintendent.

But the affair convinced her to “resign my position as superintendent of one of the most inspirational places on earth in order to also pursue matters of significant importance to me, including women's empowerment, social justice, and supporting families living with the challenges of Alzheimer's.”

Those who made the complaints against Lehnertz, who has not responded to a request to discuss the matter, remained on staff after her departure, the Traveler has been told.

The 2022 Federal Viewpoint Survey of Park Service employees noted that nearly half of those who completed the survey doubted that 'senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity' while half expressed 'a high of respect' for senior leaders. 

For his part, Sams has initiated the RISE vision, the acronym reflecting Respectful, Inclusive, Safe, and Engaged, to improve employee culture and work environment. The director has declined requests to address his efforts with the Traveler.

The overriding problem in the Park Service, according to Jeff Ruch, who for more than two decades has closely followed the National Park Service from his roles at the nonprofit watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, is a lack of repercussions for those who abuse employees.

“There has been no effective counteraction. All the things that Park Service and Interior have done have been sort of symbolic,” he said.

The Park Service’s decentralized management nature also can leave employees without a lifeline, said Ruch.

“It's a very sort of chain-of-command-oriented sort of place. … So these complaints for the most part just go unanswered. And speaking from years of doing this, individual employees trying to bring complaints against a national agency like that is just a really hard road to hoe,” he said. “Many of them never make it to the finish line because they're usually kicked out on some sort of pretense or harassed to the point where they just resigned.”

Heidi Hall, a Special Agent (Federal Criminal Investigator) with more than 21 years of law enforcement experience with the Park Service who retired last year when she reached the mandatory retirement age for law enforcement personnel, still is pursuing lawsuits over complaints of gender and age discrimination against the agency.

Hall, who maintains she was passed over for promotions that were given to less experienced male colleagues, has also filed five EEO complaints over her treatment.

“I think that I probably would have been fine if I had just stayed a regular Special Agent and just put my head down and just done my job, all the way to the end of my career,” she said. “But because I dared to apply for a supervisory job, then suddenly I became a target for all these males, male law enforcement agents in the Park Service who do not want a female in there. Most of them really didn't seem to like female law enforcement at all.”

Change, she said, might require a class action lawsuit such as one brought against the U.S. Forest Service in 1998 by two female employees who charged the agency with gender discrimination.

“They went through a class action and years and years of litigation,” the retired special agent said. “And there was a consent decree issued when they realized there was a pattern and practice happening in the Forest Service. … Something big like that needs to happen with the Park Service, where somebody with oversight can finally say, ‘This will stop and we are going to hold you accountable if you don't make it stop.’”