‘Outstanding’ Federal Worker Questions The National Benefit Of Her Termination

Since taking office last month, President Donald Trump has set his sights on reducing the federal workforce to cut government spending. For one 24-year-old West Virginia native, that came at the expense of her newly secured dream job.

Ellen Blackwood was among the roughly 1,000 National Park Service workers fired this month as part of the federal workforce reduction effort. Now, she is scrambling to find her next job — and wondering what value her termination brings the nation.

Until Valentine’s Day, Blackwood was a recreation fee technician at Acadia National Park in Maine.

“Most of it’s on Mount Desert Island in Maine and surrounded by beautiful blue ocean,” Blackwood said. “It has the mountain peaks and forests and a lot of lakes and ponds.”

Blackwood played a customer support role in what you come call the greatest office in the world; things like collecting fees from park visitors, notifying them about trail closures and helping conduct search and rescue efforts for those who get lost or separated from their groups.

The job also came with a $45,000 salary, which Blackwood said was funded through entrance fees. Learning that her job was on the cutting block was surprising.

“I thought I’d be safe. Because, not only do I work for an agency that’s so beloved by so many millions of people, but also that I’m generating revenue for the federal government by being there to collect money and ensure compliance with park fees and other regulations,” she said.

Blackwood was one of eight people terminated from the park by DOGE, the federal government’s new Department Of Government Efficiency. That makes up about one-third of the park’s workforce. In retrospect, Blackwood could have taken an offer for federal workers to resign and be paid through September, but she said she never considered it.

“I didn’t see, one, how it would be possible to keep receiving pay through September, when the government is only funded through March 14, currently,” she said. “Then, also, I just started. I want this job. This is what I’ve dreamed of doing for a very long time.”

Word came in the form of a phone call from her supervisor around 7 p.m. on Feb. 14. She drove to the office to access her personnel files and see the letter of termination. There was no information on how to hand over her keys and badge, how to expect a final paycheck or how apply for a new health insurance plan. 

But there was one line that caught her attention.

“My termination letter stated that I had failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment, and it came from someone I had never heard of. They had cc’d my supervisor,” said Blackwood.

The suggestion that her work performance was inadequate was frustrating.

“I honestly scoffed at that line. I don’t think it’s accurate at all. I had earned a rating of ‘outstanding’ on my employee performance appraisal plan,” Blackwood said. “That was signed off on and written up by my supervisor that I had until Friday. So I had not been there long enough to screw things up.”

That line, which essentially meant she was being fired “for cause,” has made collecting unemployment more challenging. Still, Blackwood thinks she will be successful.  

In the meantime, she is back in West Virginia, where she attended high school and college. She graduated from West Virginia University with a double major in recreation, parks & tourism resources and history.

Blackwood said she is grateful to have family she can stay with until she lands a new gig, hopefully in a similar field, like outdoor education or land management. She also said she understands, and  even supports, efforts to get the federal deficit under control.

But she is left wondering how her termination helps her country in any way.

“The deficit is insane. But I don’t think this is the way to do it. People in my position, or a lot of these positions — the money is not even coming from appropriated funds,” she said. 

“But also, there was no time to plan for this. And I mean no transparency, no care of who is being affected by these cuts,” Blackwood continued. “The National Park Service budget is microscopic compared to other agencies. This is not going to fix anything.”

Blackwood is back in Charleston for now, hoping her unemployment gets approved and will not be necessary for long.