In January 2019, MacNeil Lyons was four years into Yellowstone Insight, the guide service he’d founded four years earlier to bring visitors through Yellowstone National Park for wildlife, photography and history tours.
The federal government had shut down a few weeks earlier, on December 22, and much to Lyons’ delight the feds had opted to keep the gates open to Yellowstone. His team kept filling guided trips but soon realized that since park employees were furloughed, no one was working to keep the park clean.
“It was a mess because there were no essential employees,” Lyons said. “Guide companies were cleaning the restrooms and picking up trash and taking the trash out, because there were no maintenance employees doing that bit of the business. But yet we were out there every day, utilizing the facilities and the trash. And I felt like we needed to do our part.”
And here we are. Again. Tuesday evening, Senate Democrats blocked a continuing resolution measure to fund the government through November 21, all but solidifying a shutdown.
That leaves national parks including Yellowstone and Grand Teton facing a jumbled scenario. When they shut down in 2013 under President Obama, the parks locked their gates to the public. In 2018-19, parks remained open but with little or no staff, including no one taking fees at entrance gates, leading ranger tours, providing for public safety or protecting landmarks and resources. And unlike either past shutdown, this time the National Park Service did not issue any public statements previewing how it will go forward until practically the last minute.
A “National Park Service Contingency Plan” dated September 2025 and obtained by Mountain Journal on Tuesday evening stated that “park roads, lookouts, trails and open-air memorials will generally remain accessible to visitors” during the shutdown. Those that are allowed to keep part of their entrance fees can use that money to pay for “basic visitor services” including trash collection, road maintenance, law enforcement, campground operations and staffing entry gates “to provide critical safety information.” But any facilities that are closed at the end of regular business hours are to be locked until the shutdown is resolved.
Concessionaires such as hotels are allowed to keep accepting customers as long as no Park Service employees are involved.
The shutdown is expected to furlough 9,296 of the total 14,500 NPS staff, according to the contingency plan.
But the plan says nothing about how to manage public visitation in a place as ecologically fragile and dangerous as Yellowstone. For example, it doesn’t say if thermal areas should be closed or patrolled. Nor does it detail how to handle access to millions of acres of backcountry trails and campsites.
That leaves national parks including Yellowstone and Grand Teton facing a couple scenarios. First, as occurred in 2013 under President Obama, the parks would lock their gates to the public, a result that could wreak havoc on gateway communities like West Yellowstone and Gardiner. Or second, as in 2018-19, parks would remain open but with little or no staff, including no one taking fees at entrance gates, leading ranger tours, providing for public safety or protecting landmarks and resources. And unlike either past shutdown, this time the National Park Service has not issued any public statements previewing how it will go forward.
But this shutdown has the potential for far greater impacts. Historically, these budget clashes have grown longer and left greater economic carnage. And this time, the Trump administration has signaled it may use the funding lapse to make sweeping permanent changes to the federal workforce — changes that may disproportionately affect public land managers.
Gateway town businesses are already concerned about losing revenue from hotels, restaurants, gas stations, fly shops, grocery stores. Indeed, last year tourists to America’s national parks spent some $29 billion in gateway towns across the country.
“This isn’t just about shutting down the park,” Ashea Mills, owner of Walking Shadow Ecology Tours of Yellowstone, told Mountain Journal. “It also has deep impacts on hoteliers, gas stations and restaurants making this final push through October.”
Mills said she’s at risk of losing 20 client trips booked in the remainder of the shoulder season. But as of Tuesday, she still hadn’t heard if she would be able to enter the park or be locked out.
Coincidentally, the National Park Service just released an interactive economic tool showing exactly how much each park contributed to local communities. In 2024, Yellowstone added $169 million in lodging, $9.2 million in gas, and $63 million in restaurant meals. Recreation businesses like Mills’ brought in $55.6 million that year.
However, leaving national parks open but unstaffed has other consequences. More than 40 former NPS superintendents sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on September 25, asking him to close all parks if the government shuts down.
“This isn’t just about shutting down the park. It also has deep impacts on hoteliers, gas stations and restaurants making this final push through October.”
Ashea Mills, owner, Walking Shadow Ecology Tours of Yellowstone
“Past shutdowns in which gates remained open with limited staff have hurt our parks: Iconic symbols cut down and vandalized, trash piled up, habitats destroyed, and visitor safety jeopardized,” the superintendents wrote. “If you don’t act now, history is not just doomed to repeat itself, the damage could in fact be much worse.”
They noted that at least 90 national parks have already reported strains in trying to comply with Burgum’s order that parks remain open despite staffing reductions. NPS has lost an estimated 4,000 employees since the start of the Trump administration, totaling almost a quarter of its workforce, and the Interior Department has indicated it plans more firings in October.
That has led some to speculate the shutdown could become much more than a typical fight over spending levels. On September 26, the National Association of Forest Service Retirees released asix-page guide on the impacts of a federal shutdown. In addition to listing the existing laws and policies, the guide stated “the Trump administration has directed agencies to prepare both shutdown furlough and RIF notices to employees … This could result in mass employee separations after the 30-day RIF notice period. Federal-wide use of shutdown furlough and RIF separations in this manner would be unlike anything we’ve seen in the past.”
The Interior Department, which houses the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, has already swept many administrative functions such as finance, human resources and contracting to a central office and away from the separate agencies. After efforts to reduce staff were blocked in court last summer, Government Executive magazine reported “thousands of layoffs” are anticipated in October.
Some analysts predict this could “turn the government upside down,” as Government Executive’s Donald Kettl put it. Without a congressionally approved budget, Kettl wrote, the Trump administration “could prevent the administration of programs it opposes by gutting the government’s capacity to administer them. The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress.”
Or it could be a bargaining chip in a less-expansive debate over the size of the administrative state, according to Nick Bednar of the legal blog Lawfare.
Noting that using RIFs are historically rare in federal shutdowns, he wrote, “In the end, the administration’s effort to use a shutdown as a springboard for permanent workforce cuts tests the limits of both law and politics.” Whether lawmakers choose to act will determine if shutdowns remain temporary disruptions — or become a powerful tool for reshaping the federal workforce.”
The United States in 2018 and 2019 witnessed the longest government shutdown in the country’s history. For 34 days during President Trump’s first term, the gears of the federal government ground to a halt affecting nearly every aspect of the halls of American bureaucracy. The cause: loggerheads over the administration’s inability to come to an agreement with Mexico over plans for a border wall between the two countries.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated $11 billion in losses to the economy over the two quarters following the shutdown. As many as 800,000 federal workers were affected including more than 400,000 who were forced to work without pay. Native American communities suffered healthcare losses and disruptions to law enforcement and disaster relief. Small businesses were denied applications.
“People are getting paid in Congress to do their jobs and they’re not getting it done. People need to work together and stop this madness. It’s ludicrous.”
Macneil lyons, owner, yellowstone insight guide services
Government shutdowns are nothing new. But they’re not that old either. The U.S. government has shut its operations 21 times, the first in 1976 under President Gerald Ford. Most lasted less than a week. It wasn’t until 1995, under President Bill Clinton, that the shutdowns began taking more significant tolls: That year and into 1996, the cessation of government functionality cost an estimated $400 million, mainly in taxpayer dollars. The next shutdown, under President Barack Obama, cost the country approximately $2.1 billion.
What did the government get right before 1976? Mountain Journal spoke with Dr. Eric Austin, head of the political science department at Montana State University, who cleared the air over the chasm of political disagreement.
“I think there’s a couple of different factors that are playing out here,” said Austin, who teaches graduate-level courses on public policy and administrative ethics. “One is that there is a shift that really starts to accelerate with Ronald Reagan’s election and in 1980 but it starts at the state level earlier than that, which is a shift toward greater fiscal conservatism coming out of the war on poverty and Johnson’s Great Society programs.”
Today, Austin says, members of Congress face an increasing risk they will be primaried by those farther to the right or the left. The result? Stalemate. “The likelihood of individuals taking a hard fiscal line or being more willing to play a kind of political chicken just grows.”
That leaves Greater Yellowstone businesspeople like Lyons feeling federal lawmakers are letting down the American public. “I’m fed up with it,” he said. “People are getting paid in Congress to do their jobs and they’re not getting it done. People need to work together and stop this madness. It’s ludicrous.”
If the Senate fails to pass a spending bill on Tuesday, it has scheduled time on Wednesday to resume negotiations. It will recess for Yom Kippur on Thursday and reconvene again on Friday.
However, the House has already passed its plan to keep the government funded through November 21 and recessed. It won’t return to session until October 7. That means unless Senate Democrats drop their demands and accept the “clean” continuing resolution, the government will stay closed at least a week.
At Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop in Livingston, owner Dale Sexton recalled how a community of volunteers assembled to look after the park during the 2018-’19 shutdown.
“That speaks to how important Yellowstone is, and how protective people are of Yellowstone in general,” Sexton said. “And I think that will happen again. Locals will rally to clean trash and clean bathrooms and stuff. But there’s no question the economy of the Northwest will suffer. The landscape right now is so unknown and unpredictable, which is difficult to operate a business in.”
And the weather is changing fast. Although Livingston is still enjoying 70-degree days, West Yellowstone’s nighttime lows are forecast to reach 16 degrees by the weekend, and Jackson Hole is expected to dip to 25 on Sunday. That’s when NPS maintenance staff need to be draining water pipes, winterizing sewage systems and preparing buildings for the coming snows.
“We’re still surprisingly busy for this time of the year,” Sexton said. “It’s been an incredible weather window. So I’m somewhat dreading the government shutting down.”