The visitor centers at Saguaro National Park are open again on Mondays, thanks to a pair of recent court orders that restored the jobs of thousands of federal employees fired by the Trump administration.
The park resumed daily operations at its Rincon Mountain Visitor Center on the east side of Tucson and its Red Hills Visitor Center on the west side on March 31, about two weeks after federal judges in California and Maryland ordered the Trump administration to rehire some of the more than 24,000 probationary workers it summarily fired in February.
A sign hung on the locked door of the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center at Saguaro National Park on March 17. After five weeks of Monday closures, the park’s two visitor centers have returned to normal daily operations.
Those reinstatements included all 1,710 employees who were still in their trial or probationary periods at the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service.
Fred Stula, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Saguaro National Park, said two workers from the park’s interpretive staff got their jobs back as a result of the court action.
“When they were terminated, the park closed the visitor centers on Mondays. Since their reinstatement, the visitor centers are now back open seven days a week,” Stula said.
The park announced the return to normal visitor-center hours in a Facebook post, but Park Service officials have so far declined to discuss any of the recent changes to staffing or operations at the 92,000-acre preserve bracketing Tucson.
Stula said the two employees had been on staff at Saguaro for less than a year when they were fired. Prior to that, they worked as interns at the park as part of the Next Generation Ranger Corps, a partnership between Saguaro and the Friends group to recruit young people interested in careers with the Park Service.
Since the NextGen Ranger program was launched in 2015, Stula said, it has provided more than 125 interns to the chronically understaffed park, with the Friends covering 25% of the wages for those workers.
A cyclist rides past the sign for the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center at Saguaro National Park.
It’s unclear whether the government employees who have been reinstated will be allowed to keep their jobs going forward. The Trump administration has appealed the district court rulings, which came in response to lawsuits brought by 19 states, including Arizona, and a labor union representing more than 750,000 federal workers.
The White House is also said to be pushing additional budget cuts and workforce reductions across the government.
Stula said such moves could further jeopardize infrastructure, services and science at the nation’s parks, which have seen their budgets decline by 20% and their visitation increase by 20% since 2010.
“It’s something that’s concerning not just in the near-term but in the long-term,” he said. “These amazing places are being, in many ways, loved to death.”
Last year ranked as the busiest in the history of the National Park Service, with more than 331.8 million visits to almost 400 park sites from Maine to the South Pacific.
A cyclist rides past the sign for the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center at Saguaro National Park.
Saguaro contributed more than 946,000 visits to that total, the park’s sixth-highest attendance on record.
Since the Friends of Saguaro National Park was founded in 1996, the fundraising and advocacy group has provided more than $12 million in support to the park, including a record $895,000 in contributions and donated services last year alone, Stula said.
That money was used to fund all of the park’s environmental education programs and pay for roughly 60 miles worth of trail work in 2024, among other projects.
Before that, the Friends covered the cost of the scientific work and lighting retrofits necessary for Saguaro to be designated as an Urban Night Sky Place in 2023 by DarkSky International, a Tucson-based group that fights light pollution around the globe.
Stula said national parks are “going through some challenging times” right now, and Friends groups like the one at Saguaro are being called on to help like never before.
But while nonprofits can lend a hand on an interim basis, even in the face of sweeping staff reductions, “it’s not the solution,” he said.
That’s why the Friends of Saguaro National Park will continue to advocate not merely against the ongoing Park Service cuts but for real and lasting increases in funding and staffing for the nation’s most treasured places, Stula said.
