Trump Guts National Parks to Fund His Vanity Projects
NEWS & RESEARCH
Early in Trump 2.0, the administration made steep cuts to the National Park Service workforce, leaving at least 20% of parks significantly understaffed. It has also diverted park funding, including at least $67 million in entrance fees, to his pet projects in Washington, D.C., such as restoring nine long-dry ornamental fountains and covering four statues near the National Mall in 23.75-karat gold leaf. As a result, more than 1,500 urgent upgrades at parks across the country have been shelved or labeled “low priority,” including roof repairs to stop pest invasions and water leaks, replacing a guardrail along a cliff edge, making trails wheelchair accessible, providing clean drinking water, and replacing solar-power batteries that supply on-site electricity. However, Trump’s attacks on the parks don’t end there. His administration has also ordered parks to take down history exhibits that he says “inappropriately disparage Americans,” leading to the removal of displays on slavery, Indigenous people, and climate change. It has even proposed trading away a parcel of land in Yosemite National Park to a private developer. And wildlife, both in the parks and throughout the country, has become less safe under this administration, which issued an internal memo reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act. Under this new reading of the law, killing an endangered animal is only illegal if it’s done on purpose. Thus, a business could bulldoze the last habitat of an endangered salamander to make way for a housing tract and face no federal penalty, as long as killing the salamanders wasn’t the goal.
SOURCES: The Atlantic | New York Times | New York Times | New York Times
ANALYSIS & OPINION
The damage to the national parks won’t be easy to undo. “Any one of these changes could be catastrophic in its own right, especially as it relates to staffing and funding,” said Dan Wenk, the retired superintendent of Yellowstone National Park. “When the next administration comes, Republican or Democrat, funding may be restored, but it’s going to be incredibly difficult to rebuild.” Yet Trump wants to cut deeper still. His 2027 budget proposes eliminating 3,967 full-time Park Service jobs, a 31% reduction from 2025 staffing levels, while requesting $10 billion to keep beautifying the capital region, nearly eight times what the Park Service spent on projects nationwide in 2025. Both proposals are unlikely to become law, but they make the administration’s priorities clear, even as the parks face a $24 billion backlog of deferred maintenance. “The president is prioritizing D.C. at the expense of parks throughout the country,” said Emily Douce, a lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association. “Adding these new vanity projects just adds to the need.” Meanwhile, Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, questioned the trade-off directly: “While the fountains look lovely and regilding statues has value, is that really more important than some of these other very strong needs at parks throughout the system?” The censorship of history may prove even harder to reverse. Fran Mainella, who led the Park Service under President George W. Bush, has pushed back on the removal of exhibits. “Our parks tell the history of this country,” she said. “You may not like the history, but it is the history, and so you should tell the story that did take place, not come in and edit.” And the wildlife these parks were created to protect faces a similar threat. Andrew Mergen, a Harvard law professor who spent two decades supervising Endangered Species Act litigation at the Justice Department, called the administration’s new reading of the law “an assault on the act like we’ve never seen before,” as it would strip away its most basic principle: “Don’t kill endangered species.”
SOURCES: The Atlantic | New York Times | New York Times
HOW TO FIX IT
Federal action:
Pass the Protect our Parks Act, which would require the Interior Department to fully staff every national park, prioritize filling maintenance jobs, and rehire park workers forced out since January 20, 2025. It would also require the Park Service to carry out projects Congress has already funded, so repairs can’t be quietly shelved.
Pass legislation setting a minimum staffing level for every national park, based on its size and number of visitors, and require congressional approval for any cuts below that floor. The aforementioned Protect our Parks Act would rehire workers who were already forced out, but nothing in current law stops the next round of cuts, and the administration has already proposed eliminating nearly a third of the Park Service’s workforce. A staffing floor would keep any administration from hollowing out the parks without Congress signing off.
Pass the Truth in National Parks Act, which would require the Interior Department to restore any historically accurate exhibits removed or altered at national parks since January 20, 2025, including signs, plaques, and online materials. It would also stop the agency from taking down or rewriting accurate exhibits in the future, so no administration could erase history it doesn’t like.
Pass the Protecting American History Act, which would restore a slavery exhibit that the administration removed from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The exhibit stood at the park’s President’s House site, where George Washington lived as president and kept nine enslaved people. The bill would also bar any future changes to exhibits anywhere in the park without congressional approval. The Act only covers that one park, however, so it works best alongside the broader Truth in National Parks Act
Define in the Endangered Species Act exactly what “harm” and “take” mean. The law bans “taking” endangered animals, a legal term for killing or injuring them, but leaves it up to agencies to decide what that covers. The administration exploited that gap twice: a July 2026 rule erased the definition of “harm” that included habitat destruction, and its September memo declared that “take” only covers killing done on purpose. Writing clear definitions into the law itself, making habitat destruction and foreseeable accidental killing both illegal, would ensure no future rule or memo by the executive branch could narrow them again.
Pass the Safeguarding Endangered Species Act as a faster fix while Congress works on permanent definitions. The bill would reverse the July 2026 rule (although it wouldn’t directly address the September memo). A Senate resolution would do the same through the Congressional Review Act, which lets Congress overturn agency decisions by simple majority and bars the agency from reissuing anything similar.
Pass the Public Lands in Public Hands Act, which would bar the Interior Department from selling or giving away publicly accessible federal land to private parties. But it wouldn’t stop the Yosemite deal, because it exempts land trades, where the government swaps public land for private land of equal value. That’s exactly how the administration plans to give up the Yosemite parcel, though it hasn’t identified what land it would get in return. The bill also doesn’t cover easements, which let a private party use public land without owning it, another option officials have weighed that would let the developer build a private road through the park. To close these gaps, Congress could require its approval for any land trade, easement, or private access deal inside a national park.
Pass legislation to close the loophole that let the administration divert park entrance fees to Washington, D.C. Federal law requires parks to keep at least 80% of the fees they collect but lets the Park Service spend the remaining 20% almost anywhere. A fix would require that 20% to go only to repairs, maintenance, and visitor safety at parks across the country, especially the hundreds that don’t charge entrance fees and depend on this money. It could ban its use on beautification or decorative projects and cap how much any one region can receive.
Oppose the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History Act, which would direct the National Park Service to remove any content with “racial narratives” or “woke” ideology from their sites.
Block funding for Trump’s order to remove park exhibits about slavery and other “inappropriate” topics. Fifty-three House Democrats signed a letter to pressure an Appropriations subcommittee to include language in the FY 2027 spending bill that would prohibit the use of funds to “implement, administer, or enforce” his order.
Pass legislation requiring the Park Service to publicly report every quarter exactly where park fee revenue goes, broken down by park and project. Lawmakers have complained that the Interior Department hasn’t provided a clear accounting of how fee money is being spent, which is how tens of millions could be moved to Washington with little notice. Regular public reports would let Congress and visitors see diversions as they happen instead of learning about them from leaked documents.
State action:
Pass state legislation like Maryland’s endangered species law, which directly wrote into state law the definition of harm erased by the July rule, making habitat destruction that kills or injures endangered animals illegal within Maryland’s borders. To go further, states should spell out that killing an endangered animal is illegal even when accidental but foreseeable, directly countering the September memo. They could also recreate the federal permit system the September memo appears to upend, which required businesses whose projects might accidentally kill endangered animals to take steps to protect them, such as paying for conservation elsewhere. Requiring the same of any project that needs a state permit, such as for development, logging, or water use, would restore that protection no matter what federal agencies do.
Restore removed park exhibits on state land just outside park boundaries. While states can't change federal signs, they could recreate removed displays as official state historical markers along highways and roads near park entrances, or in state-run visitor centers in gateway towns. Volunteers photographed more than 10,000 park signs before their removal, which states could use to recreate removed displays and put the history back in front of visitors.
Step in to pay for staff and repairs when the federal government fails to keep national parks running. States have done it before: during the 2013 government shutdown, Arizona gave $651,000 to the Park Service under a written agreement restricting the money to paying park employees to keep Grand Canyon open, and Utah did the same for eight of its parks. States could use that same approach now to cover rangers, maintenance crews, and specific repairs the administration shelved, with each payment restricted to a named project or position so it can’t be redirected to Washington. This should be a temporary backup, though, not a replacement, since keeping the parks running is the federal government’s job.
Litigation:
Win the nationwide lawsuit brought by park, history, and science groups against the removal of park exhibits (National Parks Conservation Association et al. v. Department of the Interior). A federal judge ruled in June 2026 that the removals likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to justify their decisions, as well as the National Park Service Organic Act and the National Park Service Centennial Act, the laws that set the agency’s mission. She ordered the exhibits restored and blocked further changes, but an appeals court put that order on hold while the administration appeals. A final win would restore exhibits across the park system and block future removals.
Continue Philadelphia’s lawsuit over the President’s House slavery exhibit (City of Philadelphia v. Burgum). A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction, a temporary order requiring the exhibit to be restored while the case played out. But an appeals court reversed it and dismissed most of the city’s claims. The case can still proceed in district court, where the city’s co-plaintiffs, a Black history walking-tour company and a coalition focused on the legacy of slavery, can argue the removal harmed them. A win could force the Park Service to reinstall the original panels and stop it from changing the exhibit again.
Win the legal challenge to the September memo (Center for Biological Diversity et al. v. Burgum), brought by conservation groups that first sued over the July rule and have since expanded their case to target the memo too. A ruling striking down the memo would make accidental but foreseeable killing of endangered animals illegal again.
Win the lawsuits filed by 21 states challenging the administration’s endangered species rollbacks, including the July 2026 rule that stopped counting habitat destruction as harm (California et al. v. Burgum). The states argue the rules violate the Endangered Species Act itself, and a win would restore those habitat protections nationwide.
Challenge the Yosemite deal in court if it moves forward. A similar proposal from another developer was rejected by the Park Service and later in court. A former Yosemite superintendent said his office’s legal review found the Park Service lacked the authority to make the exchange, and he believes this attempt would likely fail in court again without an act of Congress. The National Parks Conservation Association has already vowed to take every possible action to protect Yosemite, making a lawsuit likely if the deal advances.
Legislation: H.R. 3555 - Protect our Parks Act of 2025 | H.R. 8539 - Truth in National Parks Act | H.R. 7763 - Protecting American History Act | H.R. 9901 - Safeguarding Endangered Species Act | H.R. 718 - Public Lands in Public Hands Act | HB 578 - Fish and Wildlife - Endangered and Threatened Species and Migratory Birds - Regulations, Lists, Petitions, Essential Habitats, and Takings (Maryland)
