NPS employee moves on after promotion, and DOGE firing

When Sam Peterson got the call, it was already too late.

The National Park Service was offering to give him his job back, but he'd taken a job in Oregon and three days earlier signed a lease on an apartment.

He needed to follow through on the commitment.

"We have bills," Peterson said, "and a dog."

Peterson, 26, had just started as a federal employee in June 2024 and was still in probationary status in February when the Trump administration started its Valentine's Day Massacre of federal departments, cutting personnel as Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency descended on agencies to reduce the number of government employees.

Peterson, a history and geography teacher before joining the NPS, had recently been promoted in the park and had just gotten a work phone when he received an email "from someone I've never met" telling him he was terminated for performance reasons.

Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area, with about 40-50 full-time employees, plus more in summer, was supposed to have an interpretive team of nine, but now has just three, he said. Another engineer for a project in the Fort Spokane area may also have to leave because two other temporary personnel needed for the project now can't be hired, Peterson said.

Turnover, he observed, is often "the greatest obstacle to efficiency."

His wife, Ashley St. Aubin-Clark, just had to resign from teaching sixth grade at Lake Roosevelt Elementary.

They were loading a U-Haul with the help of friends on Sunday. Peterson said he saw a job with the NPS as a career that would let him do what he loves - teach - with a lifestyle in great places that would make up for not offering the best pay in the world, but does offer ultimate stability.

At least that was the case "between 1776 and February," he said. Now, he's been feeling "a profound sense of grief and loss."

"Every job in the federal government is important and helps our country," he said, and "foolishly" he would consider going back to it someday.

For the foreseeable future, though, he's got a job in Astoria at the Columbia River Maritime Museum as a museum educator. He was on the job there when he got the call offering his old position back.

The couple found an apartment with a view of the river, Ashley said, and she plans to substitute teach.