FM man tangled up in Park Service firings

LARNED, Kan. – A former Fort Madison man is getting wrapped up in the recent firings in the National Park Service.
According to the governmental Office of Personnel Management, about 1,000 NPS employees tagged as probationary were terminated on Friday along with about 2,500 other employees in the U.S. Department of the Interior. The department issued the terminations at the direction of the OPM as part of efforts from the Department of Governmental Efficiency’s efforts to streamline federal spending.
Tyler Blind, a 2006 Fort Madison High School graduate, said he was part of the terminations at the NPS. Blind currently works at Fort Larned in Kansas, which is an authentic army post on the Santa Fe Trail known for its history with the Indian Wars.
According to the DOGE website, the agency has identified more than $55 billion in savings by canceling or renegotiating leases and contracts, selling assets, cancelling grants, finding regulatory savings, making programmatic changes to the government, and reducing the workforce.
The reduction at the NPS represented about 5% of the agency's workforce, but the term probationary is atypical in the park service.
Blind has been an employee of the park system since 2015 when he started with the Herbert Hoover facility in West Branch. He then transferred to the Larned site in 2019 before taking another transfer to the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in 2020 in Seneca Falls, NY. He had subsequent transfers to Cuyahoga Valley National Park in 2021 and then back to Kansas where he’s working with the Nicodemus National Park in Kansas and back at Fort Larned.
Despite more than a decade in service to NPS, Blind was still grouped in the “probationary” employee category because in the NPS, anytime you transfer you are considered probationary for up to a year.
“I got to work on Friday at about 8:20 and the boss texted me and told me to check emails,” Blind said.
“I thought, well this can’t be good and started looking into things, and  found all probationary employees had been terminated. And, for some reason, I was included.”
The 37-year-old Fort Madison native said he plans to fight the termination because he has paperwork from the agency indicating he isn’t a probationary employee and some indicating he is.
Blind is a grade 9 perservationist who took the job with the service because of its passion to explore and learn about history. He can use his skills in masonry preservation and construction to make a good living while helping preserve some of the nation's most historic treasures. But he doesn’t believe he’s in a probation period under NPS guidelines.
However, he points to an example he read since the announcements came down of a 30-year employee who just took a new post eight months ago that is now a “probationary” employee, and was let go under the order.
“If you change positions, you go into probationary status. I saw one guy who’s been here 30 years and he took a new position for 8 mos and he was let go because he was within a year of the transfer,” Blind said.
“I’m hearing they don’t understand why I was on the probationary list. I have lots of fun legal stuff coming.”
He said he got the phone call about his termination on Friday, but no supervisor was available to do the termination as they were to be done in person.
“He's on leave about two hours away and he couldn’t even come in. It’s like 3 oclock. And they’re not coming into town to fire me,” he said.
“I had all my stuff packed up and cleaned out my locker. Office and personnel management says (terminations) all have to be done in person. So what I do, stay here and work until you come to fire me?”
Blind said he’s hearing that his position will not be replaced and the park will be even more short-handed.

“This is a budget savings thing. Don’t say a broad sweep, it’s just a lazy blanket. People asked me last month if I was worried about getting fired. I said, 'Well, if they go through and look at things, I’m not. I’m absolutely needed here, but if they just make blanket decisions, I’m very worried.' And that’s exactly what they did,” he said.
“If you’re paying attention, they got rid of people watching over nuclear stockpile. The next day they’re trying to rehire them, but their email access was cut off so they couldn’t find them. They quickly realized, ‘Oh, we needed these people'.”
Blind said his best option is to fight the “probationary” status.
“I’d have to go in and get a bunch of paperwork, that I’m not even sure I can access because we were cut off when they announced the terminations,” he said.
“If my access and government card is cut off, I have to ask someone else to get it for me and lots of those people have been let go, too. I don’t even know how I am going to get the paper I need.”
He said the way things appear to be going with the cutting of federal employees in many departments, even if he were to win, he feels it would be to get a job back that he’ll eventually be fired from.
He said another option would be to start or join a class action lawsuit against DOGE or the government at the direction of the agency’s union. He said that action started with the deferred resignation offers that the administration offered. Blind said some of those people who had accepted the deferred resignation were then terminated as “probationary” employees.
Blind said, in his opinion, this isn’t identifying waste, it’s flat out budget cuts.
"Absolutely, somebody needs to do this work. This is budget cuts. The money they are saving is not going back to the Park Service. (President) Trump and (Elon) Musk are out there saying they are going to save money. If you’re saving money and cutting positions to save money, that money is not going to go back into the program. This is just cutting the budget."
He said projects will now not get completed, not just at Fort Larned, but around the country.
“Just fixing windows out there is a year-round permanent position. There are so many windows and they’re all made of wood. There just aren’t enough people to keep these parks viable. There wasn’t before, and now we’re really short. It’s not sustainable.”
When asked when enough is enough, Blind said the private sector isn’t much more reliable.
“I’ve worked in the private sector for quite a while before I went to Park Service. Stability and consistency - you don’t get that in the private sector either. I had a job where I’d work 16 hours a day voluntarily because there was so much work, and within five or six months, business slowed and then we went to partial hours and unemployment. And that was small business,” he said.
“I also worked at Siemens in Fort Madison and had ridiculous overtime and barely any days off. Then, within a couple months of working to the bone, it was ‘Oh hey, were going to lay you off’.”
“I love this job and I’m going to try and keep it. I’ve had a lot of jobs I hated, and this is not that. I love this and I’m going to go through the process to try and keep it. But I realize this is changing times."
Blind is engaged to his girlfriend Chelsy who has two children and is worried about the financial pinch his new family could undergo. He said it makes it worse seeing people cheering the loss of jobs American families count on.
“I’m getting married in three months and I’ve got kids to watch out for. If that’s too hard now, I have to let the dream job go and provide less financially for my family,” he said.
“Losing a job is heartbreaking. Losing a job you love is soul crushing. And then watching people cheer that on just makes it unbearable.”