The Gutting of the National Park Service
Why should the National Park Service be funding so many sites? And what would happen if some of those properties were transferred to state or tribal management?
The Trump administration is asking those sensible questions, and is proposing to cut $1.2 billion from the agency’s budget, “mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management” per Bloomberg. This is a pet issue of mine: It’s always been unclear to me why we expect taxpayers across the country to pay for the upkeep and management of so many designated sites, including ones they will never visit and have never heard of. Do you really need to be paying for New York City’s Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site? Or North Dakota’s Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site?
I say this as a nature and history appreciator. My interest is not in having these places razed; it’s in making sure the federal government is careful about where its money goes and what’s actually in the national interest.
“The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not ‘National Parks,’ in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks,” reads a federal memo on the matter. Hear, hear! “The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system.” Though an official list of sites whose management will be shifted is not yet available, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (whom you may remember from the 2024 Republican presidential primary) says that only the 63 “crown jewel” national parks will remain under NPS control.
To put the lesser-traveled sites into perspective: More than 17 million people visited the Golden Gate National Recreation Area last year. Some 16 million visited the Blue Ridge Parkway. D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial drew about 8.5 million. Nearly 5 million visited Zion National Park. Ditto for Yellowstone. But only about 11,000 visited Knife River and 25,000 visited the Roosevelt birthplace, both mentioned by Burgum as possible locations for which management could be transferred. (All figures found here.)
Others, such as North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore, are popular with visitors (2.7 million) but are also tourism hot spots drawing lots of revenue to the state; management could easily be transferred. Ditto with Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve, which draws 2.2 million annually and is nestled in the Everglades. Couldn’t Florida handle management—and ma
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