The U.S. Department of Interior boosted the number of National Park Service seasonal employees by about 2,200 positions last week, the Associated Press reported.

The moves come as the park service said in a new memo that it will hire up to 7,700 seasonal positions this year, up from about 5,000 promised earlier and higher than the three-year average of 6,350 seasonal workers. The park service has about 20,000 employees, Matthew Daly of the AP reported.

Numbers for Glacier National Park were not immediately available, but Glacier typically starts plowing the Going-to-the-Sun Road the first week in April and secondary roads in late March.

Glacier hires about 350 seasonal employees each year, including staff that help plow the roads and get them ready for the summer season.

While the seasonal hiring is a positive, about 1,000 probationary permanent employees were terminated under a Trump administration directive as part of a massive effort to trim the government workforce.

Unions that represent federal workers filed suit last week, claiming some of the cuts are illegal.

The suit, filed by the American Federation of Government Employees and other unions claims that “The Office of Personnel Management, the federal agency charged with implementing this nation’s employment laws, in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not.”

The letter that many probationary  employees received says just that.

“The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest,” the letter reads in part. “... we appreciate your service to the agency and wish you the greatest success in your future endeavors.”

Then they were fired.

The letter was shared with the Hungry Horse News and other media outlets last week.

The suit claims the cuts, in short, are unconstitutional on several fronts and that the court should rule them unlawful.

The probationary firings in particular had a deep effect on many Forest Service seasonal employees, as they were probationary under a new Forest Service hiring program implemented last year.

There has been no word on whether the reins will be loosened on seasonal hires at that agency. On the Flathead National Forest, about 40 seasonals lost their jobs under the cuts, many of which were boots on the ground jobs, like forest technicians, trail crews, and forest protection officers.

The Forest Service was already seeing a hiring freeze before the layoffs. That was implemented last fall under the Biden Administration.

While the Park Service is adding seasonal employees, there is worry about timing.

“While it’s a victory that seasonals can now be hired—though we wonder how quickly that can happen—but the cumulative impact of all of these staffing cuts raises deep concerns about the ability for parks to have the expertise and workforce across both seasonal and permanent positions to ensure the basic protection of resources and safe and inspiring visiting experience,” said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association, a national parks advocacy group.

They note that the Park Service had seen cuts even before the Trump Administration. Meanwhile, parks are seeing more visitors than ever. 

Glacier  National Park saw its second highest visitation ever last year, at 3.2 million people.