Ellyn DeMuynck never planned to leave the National Park Service. After years of studying people and culture, she expected to retire from her job as an anthropologist helping return Native belongings to their rightful tribes. Instead, she was one of about a thousand employees fired earlier this year as part of the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts, according to Sapiens and The Show.
DeMuynck worked as the coordinator for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in the NPS Southeast region. Her job was to reconnect sacred objects and ancestral remains with Indigenous communities across the country. She has since found a new position in the private sector, but she worries that the work she left behind will stall.
When the layoffs began, DeMuynck said there was a “keep your head down” attitude among employees. “We’re the National Park Service, there’s a lot of public support for the work we do — which there continues to be,” she told The Show. But as more agencies started letting people go, she realized her job might be next.
She had only been in her new position since June 2024, meaning she was still classified as a probationary employee. That made her an easy target for the cuts. “When it actually happened, it was absolutely a gut wrench,” she said. “This has been something I had been working towards. It was my career plan. I expected to do this until I retired.”
Roughly a dozen people in her office were affected in the first wave. Some accepted reinstatement offers later, but DeMuynck had already moved on. “People are really passionate about their work,” she said. “But they also have to make decisions about what’s best for them and their families.”
She admits she’s angry — not just for herself but for her colleagues who lost what she calls their “dream jobs.” She said remaining staff are now doing the work of three people and struggling to keep up. “No one’s obviously getting paid anymore. No one’s getting paid at all right now,” she said. “We just got knocked back 30 years.”
DeMuynck believes the cuts could have long-term effects on relationships between the federal government and Native communities. “All Park Service lands were Indigenous lands and continue to have connections to the first peoples that stewarded them,” she said. “Approaching public land stewardship with an anthropological perspective provides space for elevating those stories, reigniting those connections.”
When asked what she would say to people who think these jobs weren’t essential, DeMuynck said she would struggle to respond without frustration. “The parks are extremely understaffed and have been for decades,” she said. “People’s experiences at the parks, their sustainability, their existence — it’s only going to be improved when there are people there to do the work.”