The Brief

Some seasonal employees at Yosemite National Park worked for as long as six weeks without pay this spring and summer as park supervisors scrambled to manage hiring amid federal budget cuts, workers told NPR. The employees said they are now receiving hourly wages but have not been paid for the work they were asked to do as volunteers while they waited to be put on the federal payroll.  

Some of the workers said they feel exploited.

"It's definitely taking advantage of people who love their jobs and don't want the park to suffer," said one of the employees, who said they volunteered for three weeks before being hired.

NPR spoke with four seasonal and two full-time workers employed by the National Park Service who described the situation. NPR has agreed not to publish the names of the employees because they are not permitted to speak publicly and feared retribution.

Yosemite depends on seasonal workers to perform a variety of jobs from May through October, when the park receives most of the more than 4
million visitors who typically enter the grounds. The Northern California national park is one of the most visited in America.

At Yosemite, seasonal workers do "anything from campgrounds operations, to wilderness permitting for backpackers, to the seasonal interpretive rangers, seasonal maintenance staff," said Jesse Chakrin, the executive director of the Fund for People in Parks, a nonprofit that advocates for national parks. The National Park Service hires thousands of seasonal workers a year across America. More than 100 are typically hired annually at Yosemite early in the busy season, Chakrin said.

But 2025 was no typical year. On Feb. 14, 10 full-time federal employees at Yosemite were fired when the federal government terminated about 1,000 newly hired employees throughout the National Park Service. In the weeks that followed, additional experienced workers left the park service voluntarily. Since January, the amount of permanent staff across the service has declined by 24%, according to data analyzed in July by the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit that defends parks.

Then, after staff members were fired in February, some were hired back. That meant the park service's already straining Human Resources division had to take on additional work to bring those people into the workforce again, federal workers told NPR. Around late spring, when more visitors started entering the park and seasonal workers began arriving at Yosemite to start their jobs, Human Resources wasn't able to onboard all the seasonal staff, Yosemite employees said.

"We had the firing of probationary employees in February and then the rehiring, and this was a huge, huge burden on Human Resources to try to get people in and out," said Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, a nonprofit that supports workers at parks. "And seasonal hiring was delayed."

But Yosemite still needed seasonal workers. An April order from the Department of the Interior, the agency that oversees the National Park Service, said all parks should stay open as usual in 2025, with changes to operating hours requiring special approval.

Seasonal workers needed the jobs too. Many count on their employment at the park to provide them with housing. Because some parts of Yosemite are dozens of miles from the nearest city, accommodations at the park are typically offered to people who work there, for a fee.

"They're dependent upon their job to have a home," said Chakrin.

On May 18, visitors took photos at a viewing point above Vernal Fall, a waterfall at Yosemite National Park.

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In other parks, seasonal employees weren't hired at all. As of July, only about 4,500 of the people expected to fill 8,000 seasonal positions across the Park Service were working in seasonal roles, according to the data from the National Parks Conservation Association. But in late April, supervisors at Yosemite started offering some of the prospective seasonal workers a different option. If they volunteered for at least 32 hours a week at the park, they could stay in Yosemite housing for free until the federal government was able to onboard and start paying them, emails reviewed by NPR reveal.

"My supervisors were emailing people week after week saying, 'Hey, the update is there's no updates and we understand you guys need housing and you're relying on this and we're relying on you. And we don't know what's going on, but one option is to volunteer,'" said one Yosemite worker.

NPR requested an interview with a representative at Yosemite and sent questions regarding how and when seasonal workers were hired this year. The park declined to answer the questions or speak with NPR.

"We are not conducting interviews about staffing levels," said the park's public affairs officer, Scott Gediman.

Gediman recommended that NPR email the National Park Service instead. No one at the service responded to NPR's questions or request for an interview.

But workers at Yosemite told NPR they estimate that more than 50 seasonal workers volunteered for the park service in Yosemite before they were paid later in the summer. Of the four people NPR spoke with who were asked to work for no pay until they could be onboarded, one declined and did not work at Yosemite this season. The other three agreed to volunteer and wait. The workers said they signed volunteer service agreements with the federal government, some of which NPR reviewed.

The three who volunteered said they were assigned a role in a different division than the one they had originally committed to work for. The park service prohibits seasonal employees from volunteering for positions "similar to their paid work" outside of the season. That sort of policy is to prevent the federal government from exploiting workers, the park service's reference manual indicates, and to ensure the park complies with federal labor laws.

"The NPS does not allow an NPS employee to serve as a volunteer in a manner that takes advantage of an employee's willingness to perform their paid work without pay," the manual states.

The federal government also assures people that they can expect competitive pay if they choose to work in public service. But seasonal workers said that's not what they received when they worked for free for weeks. Some believe the federal government did take advantage of them.

"We're here because we need housing," one said. "And there was this urgency to have a place to go, so we did it."

The sun rises over tall granite cliffs that rise from Yosemite Valley.

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It was 'offensive' to work without pay, one worker said

For weeks, before they started being paid by the park in June, the seasonal workers spent hundreds of volunteer hours doing tasks like educating visitors and maintaining trails, they told NPR.

While the employees said they were grateful to have a place to live and understood that their supervisors at Yosemite may not have had control over hiring delays at the federal level, they thought it was unfair not to be paid for their labor.

"The idea of volunteering for the job that we already don't get paid enough to do was offensive," said one of the workers.

A few weeks into the busy season, some prospective seasonal workers were hired and paid by the Great Basin Institute, a nonprofit that promotes conservation and has partnered with national parks on projects before.

"They reached out and said, 'Hey, we've got needs,'" said Peter Woodruff, the nonprofit's chief executive, referring to staff at the Park Service. "So they turned to us for that support during a time of uncertainty."

The institute paid fewer than 30 seasonal workers at Yosemite for a few weeks, said Woodruff. But not all seasonal workers were offered the opportunity. Of the three people NPR spoke with who volunteered, only one received payment from the Great Basin Institute in between volunteering and their employment with the federal government.

Another worker labored without pay for six weeks, from early May until the end of June, before they were onboarded, the employee told NPR. During that time, they stayed in a shared room owned by the federal government that was valued at under $500 a month, their housing agreement reviewed by NPR shows.

The park ultimately onboarded the three workers at different times, from early to late June. After they started being paid by the park, from that point forward, the workers said they earned between $19 and $23 an hour. But none were paid back for the weeks they volunteered, they said, and none were promised back pay.

By asking volunteers to work in different jobs than the ones they were later paid to do, the park service may not have violated federal labor laws, said Kevin Owen, an employment lawyer who represents federal workers. Still, Owen said that the requests to volunteer could harm the park. Since experienced workers might be less likely to agree to work without pay, fewer of them may have accepted the proposal, he said.

"It will lead to either stories of long lines at national parks or stories of missing campers who can't be found when they otherwise should have been," Owen said.

Chakrin, the director of the parks nonprofit, said that parks are currently under strain and struggling with staffing across the West. But he has never heard of seasonal workers being asked to work without pay for weeks because a park couldn't onboard them on time.

"The unprecedented part that I have never seen is, in mass, having seasonals have onboarding dates that are delayed indefinitely and up to three pay periods," he said. "It's just a whole lot of a season when your season is six months long."

Copyright 2025 NPR

California librarians were stunned when a last-minute budget change stripped K-12 schools of a trove of research materials, potentially leaving thousands of students without resources to do reports, projects or homework assignments.

Without notice to schools or librarians, the Legislature last week canceled $5.5 million that pays online fees for the Encyclopedia Britannica, New York Times, PBS videos such as Ken Burns documentaries, scientific journals and thousands of other online materials used by students and teachers. The cut goes into effect on July 1, 2027.

“We had no idea this was coming,” said Greg Lucas, head of the California State Library, which helps oversee the program for California’s 10,000 public schools. “This will have a huge impact on California students.”

The program, called Compass, is an online database of research and curriculum materials that have been vetted by teachers and librarians. Compass is also available through public libraries, but the vast majority of users are at K-12 schools. Since the program launched in 2018, it’s received nearly 1 billion hits.

Students use Compass for classroom assignments as well as for recreation. Many of the materials are available in multiple languages. Among the more popular features are National Geographic Kids; Pebble Go Science, which includes hundreds of science activities for pre-kindergarten through second grade; and Alexander Street, which offers videos of cultural performances such as the Joffrey Ballet and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Compass is especially important at a time when fewer schools have libraries — and librarians — to help students with research. Although nearly 90% of schools have physical space on campus for books, magazines and other research materials, only about a quarter of those spaces are staffed by librarians. The rest are staffed by volunteers, classified employees or not at all. California ranks 49th nationwide in school librarian staffing, with nearly 10,000 students for each librarian, according to research by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Compass is available free to all schools in California. If schools were to subscribe individually to Compass materials, they’d spend more than $216 million annually, according to a State Library report. A typical medium-sized school district might pay $100,000 or more for the services, an expense lower-income districts are less likely to have money for.

Losing the service raises concerns about internet access

Without access to Compass materials, students would likely rely on free resources online. But those materials tend to contain advertisements or track user data, a violation of state student privacy laws. They also are less likely to be vetted for accuracy, a particular danger in the age of artificial intelligence.

“Losing Compass is catastrophic for the state of California,” said Kate MacMillan, library services coordinator for Napa Valley Unified. “This service is a lifeline. I can’t believe the Legislature would let this happen.”

Funding for Compass was in earlier versions of the budget the Legislature debated over the past few months. But the final version eliminated Compass funding after July 1, 2027. Instead, it directs $5 million of the funding toward the state’s new dyslexia screener, and $60,000 for technical support of an online lesson-sharing platform called California Educators Together.

Legislators and staff members on the budget education committees contacted by CalMatters did not comment on why the money was cut.

Meanwhile, librarians are launching an aggressive campaign to save the program. They’re emailing Newsom and the Legislature, and trying to bring attention to the issue.

Connie Williams, a retired school librarian and former head of the California School Library Association, said that losing Compass will exacerbate disparities in the state’s education system. Lower-income schools will lose crucial learning resources, while higher-income schools will be able to pay the subscription costs themselves, without state assistance.

“The disparity will be overwhelmingly glaring,” Williams said. “We’re leaving students at the mercy of whatever is free on the internet.”

It’s especially galling, she said, that this move comes as the state is promoting media and digital literacy in schools. In 2023 California enacted a law requiring schools to teach media literacy in all subjects, with a focus on teaching students to recognize fake news, determine if an information source is trustworthy and generally think critically about what they view and read online.

“We want students to think critically, put away their phones, know how to do research,” Williams said. “And we’re grabbing away some of the best learning tools we have.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

In a sharp rebuke to President Donald Trump, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court's 6-3 opinion.

The decision firmly rejected the executive order that Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It sought to bar citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to parents who either entered the country illegally or who are living and working here legally with temporary visas. The executive order never went into effect because every lower court judge who reviewed it concluded, in the words of one judge, that it was "blatantly unconstitutional."

Trump has long maintained that the Constitution does not guarantee birthright citizenship. But as Chief Justice Roberts observed, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War defined citizenship in broad terms on purpose, rejecting the views of those who wanted to limit citizenship. The resulting language of the amendment says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

Trump maintained that the provision was meant to apply only to former slaves, but "wasn't meant for the entire world to occupy the United States." That interpretation, however, has not been embraced by the courts or the legal norms of the country for 160 years. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts' opinion for the court pointed to the court's landmark ruling well over a century ago in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants. Back then, no documentation was required for immigrants entering the United States, and his parents ran a business in San Francisco until they ultimately returned to China. In 1895, their son visited his family in there, but was denied re-entry upon his return to the U.S., on the grounds that he was not a citizen. He challenged that denial and won in the Supreme Court.

By a 6-to-3 vote, the justices interpreted the words, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," to mean that all children born in the U.S. were automatically granted citizenship — with three limited exceptions, only one of which exists today — for the children of foreign diplomats.

The decision in the Wong Kim Ark case was so widely accepted that even in periods of great hostility to immigrants, the notion of birthright citizenship remained untouchable. So much so that in World War II, when Japanese citizens were held as enemy aliens in detention camps in the United States, their newborn children were automatically granted American citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. In addition, Congress subsequently codified that legal understanding.

The ACLU's Cecillia Wang, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, argued the birthright case in April before the Supreme Court. As she put it, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent, the idea being that "in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you're born in this country, we're all American, all the same."

Dissenting from Tuesday's decision were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito.

This is a developing story and will be updated

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The Supreme Court yet again loosened campaign finance restrictions on Tuesday by striking down limits on how much political parties may raise and spend on candidates.

By a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court ruled the law, which had been enacted in 1974, violates political parties' First Amendment rights. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion.

At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections. But unlike parties, they cannot coordinate with candidates.

Tuesday's decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.

Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.

Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.

This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.

The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections. The following year, the court dismantled Arizona's public election financing scheme, which gave money to less-funded candidates in order to equalize spending between politicians. And in 2014, the court struck down limits on how much money an individual can donate in national elections. All of these decisions were ideologically split votes, just like Tuesday's ruling, and in each case, the court overturned the regulations for burdening the First Amendment right to spend on elections.

The practical implications of Tuesday's ruling are unclear. Lawyers for the Democratic Party, who intervened in the case in support of the campaign finance restrictions, argued that they are necessary to prevent quid pro quo corruption. Authorizing unlimited coordinated expenditures would "fundamentally reshape the campaign finance regime," they wrote. "The potential for actual or apparent corruption is obvious."

Further, in previous decisions, the high court cited these anti-corruption protections as reasons why other campaign finance regulations could be rolled back without worry.

But the Republicans who brought the case argued that the risks of corruption are low. "It doesn't make any sense to think of a party as 'corrupting' its candidates," lawyers for the Republicans argued in a brief submitted to the court, "because the very aim of a political party is to influence its candidate's stance."

This is a developing story and will be updated

Copyright 2026 NPR

The Supreme Court once again leaped into the culture wars on Tuesday, ruling that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has long coached his daughters' and other girls' basketball teams at school, wrote the court's majority opinion.

The court's decision follows last year's ruling, which upheld state laws that make it illegal for doctors and other health professionals to provide gender-affirming care for minors. Since then, a total of 25 states have criminalized or banned gender-affirming care for minors. And in some states, bills have been introduced to ban gender-affirming care for adults, too.

At the heart of Tuesday's case is Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in education programs that receive federal money. Enacted in 1972, the law has revolutionized women's sports by requiring equal treatment for male and female athletes, including proportional scholarship funding and equal facilities.

But in recent years, 27 states have barred trans women and girls from participating in girls' sports. The issue has become the newest flashpoint in both politics and law — especially after 2024 when the Trump presidential campaign aired attack ads on the subject more than 15,000 times, putting Democrats on the defensive.

Supporters of the ban on trans athletes say the laws are needed to prevent athletes whose assigned sex at birth was male from having an unfair advantage in women's sports. Opponents of the transgender bans say they discriminate based on sex, in violation of both federal law and the Constitution's guarantee to equal protection of the law. And for athletes at every level, the issue is deeply personal, with tennis greats Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova on opposing sides, for example, along with hundreds of other high-profile athletes.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court tried to thread the needle, ruling that since Title IX explicitly allows sex-segregated athletic teams, states are free to limit team players to their sex at birth.

The two cases before the court were factually quite different. One involved Lindsey Hecox, a trans college student barred by Idaho law from trying out for the Boise State University varsity women's track team. She challenged Idaho's ban on trans athletes, contending it violated her right to equal protection of the law under the Constitution. Ultimately, after dropping out of school, she won her case in the lower courts, but upon returning in 2025, she decided not to play varsity sports.

This is a developing story and will be updated
Copyright 2026 NPR