Four of Utah’s largest and most visited national parks and monuments operate from the same office in Moab. This facility is now squarely in the crosshairs of President Trump’s government efficiency cuts. On March 3, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced that it was terminating this office’s lease.
This 35,000-square-foot facility in Utah houses engineers, resource crews, search and rescue, archeological surveyors, and more. Without it, many employees would be displaced, and equipment, vehicles, and archaeological artifacts would have nowhere to be stored.
Also, the operation and maintenance of the Southeast Utah Group, an NPS area that includes Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and regional national monuments, and that sees over 2.5 million visitors annually, would have no headquarters of operation.
The DOGE website lists the annual lease cost for this facility as $805,408, and the total savings for canceling the lease at $8,058,490.
This facility is just one of many that are now on the chopping block. Leases for NPS offices all over the country have been swept onto a DOGE list for lease termination. Some, like the NPS Service Building in Fairbanks, Alaska, have been removed from the list thanks to public outcry and action from local politicians. However, several others, like the NPS office in Moab, remain on the docket.
GearJunkie contacted the Utah NPS media coordinator Karen Henker, who works in the Southeast Utah Group NPS office in Moab, for this story. She declined to comment and referred questions to the NPS Office of Public Affairs, which provided the following statement.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are prioritizing strategic reforms to maximize resources, cut waste, and enhance operational effectiveness across our facilities,” the office told GearJunkie. “These efforts reflect our broader commitment to streamlining government operations while ensuring that conservation efforts remain strong, effective, and impactful.”
Moab NPS Office: More Than Cubicles & Desks
Cassidy Jones is an ex-NPS park ranger in Utah and a program manager at the National Park Conservation Association (NPCA), a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that advocates for National Parks. Jones is familiar with the Southeast Utah Group Moab NPS office. She explained that it serves as a base for far more than staff cubicles and desks.
According to Jones, this headquarters stores extensive river operation equipment, like rafts and gear for resource protection, facility maintenance, and more. It also has maintenance bays and parking for the fleet of NPS vehicles used to service the parks.
“There’s not exactly just another large, well-designed building waiting for all the pumper trucks and the boats to go hang out in if this lease were canceled,” Jones said. “So it’s a pretty unique space that the government has already invested quite a lot of money into, so that it suits the needs in a very ideal way for all of these very unique facilities.”
The facility provides management, support, and safety functions such as IT, maintenance, public use permits, law enforcement, search and rescue, and wildfire response.
Then there is the archaeological storage. Jones said the Moab NPS office is home to the museum collection archives for all four of the parks and monuments in the Southeast Utah Group. The artifacts stored there are often delicate items that require special condition-controlled environments.
“A lot of the objects that help us understand the [parks’ histories] and that are meant to be protected in perpetuity are in that building,” she said.
Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the NPCA, issued a statement calling the proposed cancellations “reckless and short-sighted.”
“These closures will cripple the Park Service’s ability to operate parks safely and will mean millions of irreplaceable artifacts will be left vulnerable or worse, lost,” Pierno said.
An Already Efficient Facility
In total, the NPS Southeast Utah Group encompasses Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Hovenweep National Monument, as well as Natural Bridges National Monument. Collectively, those parks and monuments see more than 2.5 million visitors each year. Arches — the closest National Park to the Moab NPS office — alone welcomes roughly 1.5 million visitors a year.
Managing the operations of all four parks and monuments out of the same location is much more efficient than debasing those operations and scattering them to the winds, Jones argued.
“The Southeast Utah Group is operating with a whole lot of administrative efficiency by grouping all of these things together,” she said. “The concept that eliminating this building would contribute to government efficiency just doesn’t really ring very true in this case.”
Jones believes the Moab office and others like it received the axe because they just seem like easy targets; most of them have soft leases with renewal, renegotiation, or cancellation dates upcoming.
“[These leases] seem to have just made it onto a list because of a couple of happenstance conditions,” she said. “This list, in my mind, didn’t use any real information to determine that these offices are, in fact, ‘unnecessary.’”
Action Proves Effective
While the Moab NPS office remains on the public DOGE list of lease cancellation targets, other NPS facilities have been removed. In some cases, local activism, community outcry, and political action have changed the outcome.
The interagency NPS hub in Fairbanks, Alaska, is one example. This facility serves as a gateway to national parks in the Arctic and offers veteran services and other community functions. Locals and elected officials opposed canceling the leases, and the facility was removed from the DOGE list as a result.
Similarly, Jones believes some other offices on DOGE’s list can be saved.
“People should absolutely continue to engage in and have wonderful experiences in Southeast Utah Group parks so that they can tell their stories about why these places and the services and caretaking and stewardship are essential,” she said.
Visit the NPCA website to stay informed about news about these offices, their leases, and DOGE’s progress. It’s regularly updated with news related to this and other issues currently facing NPS.
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