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The US Public Loves the National Park Service. Trump Is Destroying It Anyway. [1]
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Date: 2025-07-13 14:49:43+00:00
Trump is pushing for cuts that could require 350 of the 433 sites run by the National Park Service to shut down.
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If there is one thing Americans love, it’s our national parks. A record-setting 331 million people visited the 63 national parks in 2024 — a number roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. population. Park visitors spend tens of billions each year on lodging, restaurants, and travel expenses, significantly boosting local economies. The National Park Service is the most popular government agency, with just 7 percent of polled Americans rating it as unfavorable. And the people want it funded: Just 17 percent of polled U.S. residents support reducing funding for the National Park Service and other agencies that manage federal lands.
Yet none of this has deterred Donald Trump and congressional Republicans from seeking to devastate the National Park Service.
Trump’s proposed FY 2026 budget would slash $1.2 billion from the National Park Service budget — the largest proposed cut in the agency’s 109-year history, according to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a nonprofit advocacy organization. Trump’s budget proposes cuts to National Park Service recreation and preservation programs, natural resource programs, and cultural programs, as well as cutting both seasonal positions and more than 5,500 full-time roles.
NPCA estimates that cuts of this magnitude would require the elimination of 350 of the 433 sites run by the National Park Service, which in addition to the 63 national parks, include historic sites, monuments, battlefields, preserves, seashores, and more. The Center for American Progress calculated the cuts would amount to an inflation-adjusted 55 percent reduction in spending per visitor from 2011.
Even some congressional Republicans expressed concerns over the austerity of Trump’s National Park Service budget — although they proposed cuts of their own. The reconciliation bill, which passed the Senate on July 1, rescinds $267 million in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act earmarked for the National Park Service.
The budget cuts are just the latest in a string of attacks on the agency. From inauguration through May 21, NPCA tracked 56 actions from the Trump administration that damage national parks and public lands, noting that “the list of attacks feels endless.”
Many of these attacks involve staff reductions. The National Park Service has lost an estimated 13 percent of its staff since January, through a combination of layoffs, pressured buyouts, and hiring freezes. This has battered an agency that already lost 20 percent of its staff between 2010 and 2023, thanks to underfunding.
DOGE in Charge
To top it off, the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service and 10 other agencies, is being run by DOGE.
In April, Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, the ultra-wealthy former governor of North Dakota, handed over significant control of the Department to Tyler Hassen, who initially came to the Department of the Interior as a DOGE operative. In a secretarial order, Burgum authorized Hassen to make policy decisions, transfer funds, and make staffing changes.
Cuts of this magnitude would require the elimination of 350 of the 433 sites run by the National Park Service.
Hassen has no government experience. He spent two decades as an executive at an oil rig company, where he made nearly $4 million annually. According to the AP, Burgum changed Hassen’s title from “assistant secretary” to “principal deputy assistant secretary,” a loophole that allows him to skirt rules banning conflicts of interest and requiring Senate confirmation. Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, told the AP this amounts to fraud.
“Delegating sweeping authorities and responsibilities to a non-Senate confirmed person in violation of the Vacancies Reform Act is baffling and extremely troubling,” Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico wrote in a May letter to Burgum.
Visitors to Arches National Park in July 2025 witnessed this creative protest against the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Park Service: a giant statue of Elon Musk’s head with a sign reading “Make America Wait Again” and “Longer Lines Thanks to DOGE Cuts.” Nancy Charmichael
“If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, in a statement. “Instead, it looks like Burgum plans to sit by the fire eating warm cookies while Elon Musk’s lackeys dismantle our national parks and public lands.” (Burgum has allegedly requested Department of the Interior employees to bake cookies for him and his guests.)
Rokala continued: “DOGE’s unelected bureaucrats in Washington have no idea how to staff a park, a wildlife refuge, or a campground. They have no idea how to manage a forest or prepare for fires in the wildland-urban interface. But Doug Burgum just gave DOGE free rein over all of that.”
In April, Hassen attempted to fire Anthony Irish, an attorney who had been with the Interior for two decades, after Irish expressed concerns about giving DOGE access to a personnel payroll system. Irish was placed on investigative leave.
In a January survey of voters from eight Western states, conducted by the State of the Rockies Project, 87 percent (including the vast majority of Republicans) said that decisions about public lands should be made by career professionals such as rangers, scientists, and fire fighters, not appointed outsiders from other industries.
Yet, under Trump, the appointed outsiders are in charge, while the National Park Service sheds career professionals in droves.
National Park Service staffing levels were first hit by the administration’s 90-day hiring freeze in January, which has been extended. The Department of the Interior also offered multiple rounds of pressured buyouts. And in February, the administration fired 1,000 probationary employees who had been in their roles for less than a year. Although they were later reinstated by a federal judge, the Department of the Interior appealed the decision and delayed rehiring, and ultimately not all returned to work.
Burgum testified before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee in May that the park service had “about 26,500 people.” Yet a Washington Post review of internal Interior data found there were actually 18,066 full-time and seasonal employees. And while there were just 448 people working in IT and HR positions across the entire Park Service, Burgum further claimed: “We got several thousand people working in IT, and I don’t know what they do.”
A Worse Visitor Experience
Since the various National Park Service cuts and staff reductions went into place this year, visitors have encountered closed ranger stations, campgrounds, lakefronts, and bathrooms. Some parks have warned that search and rescue efforts will be delayed.
The cuts would amount to an inflation-adjusted 55 percent reduction in spending per visitor from 2011.
Staff reductions only amplify the many dangers caused by the climate crisis. Temperatures are rising twice as fast in national parks, which tend to be in climate sensitive regions, than in the country as a whole. This means a bare-bones National Park Service staff is dealing with more wildfires, as well as more guests suffering from dehydration, heat stroke, and heat-induced heart attacks. Yet, the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to deny and accelerate climate change.
Starting in June, the National Park Service added signage with QR codes to national parks around the country, asking visitors to report language in the parks that is “negative about either past or living Americans or that fails to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes.” This followed a Trump executive order calling for federal lands to remove information that could “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures.”
It isn’t the first attempt to erase history at National Park Service sites. In February, the agency removed references to queer and transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument website.
But if the National Park Service assumed park visitors would be eager to help with the censorship project, they were wrong. In fact, the first nearly 200 visitor submissions contained not one sincere suggestion, according to an analysis by the publication, Government Executive. Instead, most submitters criticized the project, writing comments like: “The entire purpose of parks like this one is to learn from the mistakes of the past so we can avoid repeating them. Please do not water down the reality of the experience for future visitors.”
Privatization of Parks and Public Lands
Destroying the National Park Service is just the first step toward privatization of the parks, warned former National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis and Gary Machlis, a former science adviser to the director, in a May op-ed in The Guardian. After slashing the budget and workforce, they predicted, “the administration will claim the private sector can better run (read ‘exploit’) the parks that the administration purposely set up to fail.” Their op-ed paints a grim picture of national parks marred with resorts, “ticketed bison petting zoos,” zip lines, and golf courses.
While these fears have not yet come to fruition, Trump and his allies do appear determined to sell off and privatize public land. In March, Trump issued executive orders calling for increased timber production and increased mining on federal land. In April, his USDA rolled back Biden protections, opening thousands of acres of land in Nevada and New Mexico for drilling and mining.
The AP reviewed a draft copy of the Department of the Interior’s new strategic plan, which includes increasing “clean coal, oil, and gas production through faster permitting,” and reducing regulations to “generate more revenue from lands and resources for the U.S. Treasury.”
In one high-profile attempt at privatizing public land, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah attempted to use the budget reconciliation bill to force the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to sell between 2.2 and 3.3 million acres of public land within five years, while making more than 250 million additional acres available for sale. When his proposal was stripped from the bill by the Senate’s parliamentarian, Lee inserted a scaled-back version, which he ultimately withdrew in the face of opposition from several western Republican senators.
While advocates celebrated the removal of Lee’s proposals, other public land remains under threat. The Idaho Capital Sun noted in July that public land advocates are “fighting a multifront battle” as the Trump administration seeks to revoke environmental protections; roll back protected statuses; and expand logging, mining and drilling operations. Referring to Lee’s proposal, the paper cautioned: “Given the vocal backlash to the initial sell-off plan, advocates expect future attempts to be shaped behind closed doors and advanced with little time for opponents to mount a defense.”
In the State of the Rockies Project survey, respondents overwhelmingly want Congress to prioritize conservation over energy development on national public lands, and oppose selling public land for housing development. Yet public opinion on the parks and federal land seems to matter little to Trump and his conservative allies.
This marks a shift even from Trump’s first term, when he signed the bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act, which provided billions in funding for the national parks system. At the bill’s signing, Trump called himself “the same or almost as good” a conservationist as Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, Interior Secretary Burgum also venerates the 26th president; Politico called him a “Teddy Roosevelt stan” whose pet legislative project as North Dakota Governor was the creation of a Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
Yet, Trump and Burgum’s ongoing decimation of the National Parks Service prioritizes short-sighted spending cuts over Roosevelt’s vision of the parks as a treasure to protect for future generations.
“Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it,” Roosevelt said of the Grand Canyon in 1903, which he designated as a national monument. “What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see.”
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