By now it’s clear the Trump administration is far outside public opinion in its views of Western public lands. Efforts by Trump ally Senator Mike Lee of Utah to sell off tens of millions of acres of national forest and other public lands months ago met a strong rebuke from people across the political spectrum, especially republicans. Yet Trump’s staff continues to dismantle our system of federal lands in direct conflict with the wishes of most Americas according to numerous polls.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a billionaire oil and computer industry tycoon is the first Interior Secretary in American history working to outright destroy the land management agencies he supervises rather than support them as his predecessors have. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the National Park Service which manages the most important natural and cultural heritage lands in the United States have all suffered serious attacks from Doug Burgum and those attacks are intensifying.
Trump hired two anti-government extremists in the first days of his second term. One was Elon Musk who randomly fired tens of thousands of federal workers and closed entire agencies with no apparent knowledge of what those agencies do for the American people. Trump hired a man named Russel Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) who is a true anti-government fanatic, intent on disabling the federal government, especially what they call “democrat agencies.”
Vought and Trump both view agencies that work on environmental protection with contempt since neither believe the environment needs protection and both believe that climate change is a “hoax”. Trump is a true culture warrior, and the environment has become a key polarizing topic for the right. This is a departure from a hundred years of bipartisan support for conservation and pollution control among past conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan, both Bush’s, and especially Richard Nixon. Polls show most republicans today support public lands and support efforts to stop air and water pollution.
Russel Vought’s crusade against federal agencies has taken a huge toll on our national parks. In the first days of Trump’s second term Vought fired a quarter of the National Park Service staff which was operating at bare minimum staffing after decades of inadequate appropriations from Congress. The National Park Service budget is 1/15th of one percent of the federal budget but Vought and Doug Burgum plan another mass firing of NPS staff as soon as the government shut down ends. Already the national parks are barely able to function with less than minimal staff, but more firings are coming with no end in sight. Trump proposes a billion-dollar cut to the $3.6 billion NPS budget next year.
These are ideological attacks and show that the Trump regime has no concern whatsoever for our public lands or their place in our public life or economy.
During the shutdown, Burgum kept the parks open but grossly understaffed and they suffered lawlessness and vandalism. Perhaps this is his ideal or perhaps selling the parks to billionaires is the secret goal. But for many reasons, NPS management is the only way to protect our national heritage for present and future generations.
National Park visitation in New Mexico generates $190 million per year for our economy. Nationally, park visitors annually spend $26 billion visiting parks. Numerous polls show the American people love the national parks, with bipartisan support reaching a 70% approval rating the for the NPS across political party affiliation.
Yet Burgum and Vought continue their relentless, lethal sabotage of our national parks and other federal lands.
It is easy to think that these hard right politicians go after trivially small agencies like the National Park Service because they know the people who work at the parks don’t vote for Trump. They may even assume that the millions of people who visit the parks are also not MAGA supporters and they may believe that the mission of the NPS, which is to protect the land or historic sites and educate the public about their values, is inherently evil from the perspective of the hyper-capitalist, fundamentalist Christian point of view.
If they believe park visitors are democrats only, they are dead wrong on this front. Park visitors come from a broad spectrum of American and international society. Even so, the culture wars are clearly a key driver of the Trump administration’s behavior as we see them favoring the military and the immigration militia (ICE) over just about everything else within the federal government. Of course, the vast budgets spent on the Pentagon bureaucracy, farm subsidies, and military contracts also don’t seem to receive their “waste fraud and abuse” scrutiny.
The regime is receiving serious push-back on their attacks on the national parks. Republicans in Congress have been deluged with calls and emails objecting to the Vought cuts. Unless these republicans are talking to Burgum and Vought quietly and telling them to back off, we can only assume they are remaining loyal to Trump on the topic of national parks. We can only hope they hear us and have some basic respect for our nation’s heritage and speak up.
The November 2025 election did not go well for republicans. They may be worrying about the midterm elections despite their efforts to suppress the vote by banning mail in voting, purging voter rolls of minority voters, and possibly posting the military outside blue voting stations as experts expect them to do. A blue wave would wash over all this anti-democratic meddling. But can the parks wait another year for relief from potential new democrats in Washington? Will Burgum double down on his effort to ruin the NPS before then? And if he does will it be possible for Americans to rebuild the NPS in the future when these extremists have been sent home?
What you can do. Write your Congresspersons even if you think they agree with you about our parks. Donate money to the National Parks Conservation Association and the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. These people are stretched thin now fighting Trump on multiple fronts.
