President Trump’s decision to keep national parks open during the government shutdown may seem like an attempt to avoid blame for frustrating U.S. travelers. But conservation groups and park workers claim that it will only further crush America’s most popular federal agency.

For months, the National Park Service (NPS) had been operating with a gutted workforce, thanks to Trump’s mass layoffs that cut staff by almost a quarter and left parks around the country “scrambling to operate with bare-bones crews,” as the National Parks Conservation Association, a century-old advocacy group, put it this summer.

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REOPENING PARKS IS ONLY THE LATEST ATTACK on the NPS, which runs 433 parks and welcomed a record 332 million people last year. Over the last nine months, the Trump administration’s budget cuts and layoffs have caused at least one-fifth of the parks to be “significantly strained and understaffed,” which came on top of a decade of progressively smaller NPS budgets, according to an investigation by The New York Times. The paper found that between April and July, more than 90 national parks reported issues because of workforce and budget cuts. In addition to dirty, unstocked bathrooms, an end to tours and lectures, and shuttered visitor centers, national parks across the country also lost millions of dollars because no one was there to collect fees.

“Some of the impacts of the staff cuts are visible to the public, but many are not yet. And all of this is only going to get worse,” Phil Francis, a 40-year veteran of the Park Service who chairs the advocacy group Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, told the Times.

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