Think about what happens to you when you finally pry yourself out of your routine, out of the comfort of home and stores and go outside. If you are lucky you can go to one of the grandest landscapes on earth, a place like the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Here the land and the sky take over your being. You look for animals, you hear the birds and the sound of the creek. You watch the clouds build to an afternoon thunderstorm. You have some time here and this becomes what life is all about, not only while you are there, but especially when you are not there.
We’ve worked hard, thousands of us, to make this experience possible. We’ve made the Valles Caldera an American place, a core, an anchor, a place for all of us. More than that we’ve made it a place for all the plants and animals that need to live here because there is nowhere else for them to be. We have built community around this place even when we don’t know each other.
The Caldera is not the only such place. There are hundreds of national park sites around the country that are important for visitors and locals alike.
Now we have a bunch of people with too much power in Washington who don’t see it this way at all. They don’t see the Caldera or Bandelier or the hundreds of historic sites critical to the story of our country as anything more than an expense on a spreadsheet. They think we should use the 5 million dollars we spend on taking care of the Caldera for something else consistent with their views.
Worse, the trivial amount of money we spend on the entire national park system is not the point to them. They know that the national parks cost so little to the taxpayer that finding their budget among all the line items on the federal budget is looking down to the smallest expenditures there are. They pretend this is a fiscal issue and they are being responsible with our money. But in fact, it has nothing at all to do with money. This is the culture wars all over again. The Interior Secretary Doug Burgums, the Donald Trumps, the Russel Voights… these people dislike the scientists, the workers who make the National Park Service function, the rangers and the volunteers. They don’t like this culture, and they don’t like that we’ve organized to protect things that have little to do with capitalism and everything to do with spirituality and knowledge and a greater community continuing over generations of people. The national parks are a refuge from capitalism even as they stimulate it in the communities that surround them.
For decades conservationists turned to the federal government as the place to vest our most valuable places for long term protection. We stuck the most critical and beautiful or historically important places in the national park system for safe keeping. Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Lincoln’s home, Chaco Canyon. Every administration, even the worst of them like the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations has honored that understanding. They may not have given the parks all the money they needed but they kept a 109 year-old promise overall and the NPS staff has labored away, decade after decade with inadequate budgets but enough to fulfill the mission. They created a quality of management and experience that the public has learned to count on, places where we turn our attention to things that deeply matter.
Now we have Trump. And Trump not only doesn’t care about any of the above, he wants to wreck it along with most of the rest of the federal government. Under the havoc of the democrat’s failure in the 2024 election, republicans took over the entire federal government from the Supreme Court on down. Most republicans appear to be without principals and yield their power happily to the extremists that Trump has surrounded himself with. They have confirmed the likes of Robert Kennedy Jr. and Doug Burgum who openly lied in their confirmation hearings and were never held to account for it.
In the past, even the worst administrations mostly kept faith with the American people. They may not have agreed with everything agencies do, but they mostly respected the system and played by the rules. Trump is not like that. He is the guy who takes over the major art museum and then goes in to destroy the artwork. Then he tells the appalled public he did it because they asked him to. He has grabbed too much power and so have the agency wreckers he hired to ruin all the federal agencies.
Someone in the Trump orbital hired Doug Bergum as Interior Secretary. At first, I thought Doug might be okay as a governor of a rural state in the Midwest. All of us in the conservation world thought he might do the usual republican things of promoting oil development on public lands and weakening protections for wildlife and watersheds though the normal processes where people battle these issues in the administrative and political processes.
But Doug turns out to be a genuine radical. He has three major land agencies under his “control,” the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service. He and his friends from DOGE decided it was time not to reform these agencies but to disable them. In the case of the Park Service, he apparently plans to eliminate it over the remaining Trump years. He has fired thousands of NPS workers and proposes to fire thousands more if the courts will let him.
Burgum has suggested shutting down NPS regional offices that provide critical support for the parks in the field. He also suggested that most of the staff in the Washington DC office of the NPS is extraneous and he wants to fire most of them. But it doesn’t stop there. He wants to cut deeply into park staff leaving all our parks understaffed to the point where the parks may no longer be able to function and the NPS may no longer be able to protect the parks from ever-growing crowds that visit them. Bergum ordered the NPS to keep parks open even if there is little or no staff to protect them. He figures the public won’t notice his work that way.
Even before these staff cuts, the NPS has been operating at below necessary staffing levels and with inadequate budget.
Meanwhile, republicans in Congress have approved Trump’s 30% cut to the NPS budget that the National Parks Conservation Association says will require closing 350 NPS units around the country. Doug Bergum justifies this by saying that the NPS doesn’t need to manage smaller units, just the “national parks”. That means all national historic sites, national preserves, national monuments, national trails etc. would be shed from the federal government. Bergman doesn’t really know how to do this so he suggested county park systems, states, corporations could take over. Just get them off the balance sheet because he doesn’t know what the smaller parks are for and he doesn’t care.
Bergum, like his boss Trump, likes to disregard the rules and do massively illegal things on their crusade to remake the government in the MAGA image. Except for some national monuments, all NPS areas were designated by Congress and past presidents. Legally to remove a given place from the national park system, Bergum needs to get Congressional approval. Perhaps the current Congress would grant him the power to divest hundreds of NPS units but maybe not. Will the Supreme Court go along? Bergum plans to just give away our parks like it is his personal yard sale and Congress and the American people be damned.
The problem is that the national park system is not his to give away. He may be the top administrator, but these lands belong to all Americans and are held in trust by the Department of the Interior.
The US Constitution vests power over the public lands squarely in Congress under the Property Clause. The Executive does not have the power to divest public lands. Note that Trump tried to shrink the size of national monuments created under the Antiquities Act during his first term. In that case the lands were to remain federal, just with less protection. The Bergum proposal is to remove millions of acres from the federal land system and from the national park system entirely. These lands would no longer belong to the American people who have been funding them.
Is this what the public wants? Here is the rub. Polls show that a large majority of Americans, especially those in western states strongly support our system of public lands. Even conservatives in the west support public lands in large numbers. Americans want to keep their public lands. People care for these lands passionately.
On top of their popularity, land units with the NPS arrowhead on their entry are huge draws for the public and the visiting public pumps billions of dollars into the local economies. Conservatives know this. Taking down the NPS arrowhead and replacing it with a county park symbol in most cases would cause a major drop in local economic activity. These economic impacts would far hardest on republican areas of the west.
The MAGA movement to greatly shrink the national park system runs against the conservative agenda and against the conservation agenda. The only people who want this are the anti-government extremists populating the Trump regime. Yet they soldier on, largely because republicans in Congress are frightened of Trump and feel they need to give him anything he wants even if it angers their constituents and threatens their reelection.
Trump’s staff put it this way in their budget justification: “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. 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.”
Many? Urgent need? There is an urgent need to counter this nonsense narrative from the Trump regime. This ignores the history of the national park system. Each unit of the system was nominated by members of the public and added through an extensive and skeptical vetting in Congress. None of these are local parks. They were added to the NPS system because of their national significance or because of their vulnerability to destruction. The Valles Caldera National Preserve is just such an area.
The budget of the National Park Service is 1/15th of 1 percent of the federal budget. The Trump crowd’s obsession with cutting all agencies regardless of their mission or their popularity urgently needs to stop.
Meanwhile Utah US Senator Mike Lee inserted a provision in the Big Ugly Bill to sell of 250 million acres of national forest and BLM land. His is a test balloon to see how Congress and the public reacts. The Trump II years are a slow motion nightmare.
