The National
Park Service

Wallace Stegner called national parks "the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst." For 109 years, this idea — that some places are too beautiful, too historically significant, or too irreplaceable to be sold off, dammed, drilled, or paved — has been protected by an agency built by Theodore Roosevelt's allies, expanded by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and supported by every president from Wilson to Biden.

The National Park Service was created on August 25, 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act. It consolidated 35 parks and monuments under a single agency with a single mission: "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

Under its first director, Stephen T. Mather — a wealthy industrialist who personally paid the salaries of the first park rangers and bought land out of his own pocket to expand the parks — the agency grew. Mather hired the first generation of park rangers. He built the first scenic park roads. He brought the public in. After his death in 1930, every national park installed an identical bronze plaque in his honor, ending with a line that captured what the work meant: "There will never come an end to the good that he has done."

By 2024, the Park Service had grown to manage 433 sites across all 50 states and US territories — covering 84 million acres. In that single year, those sites received 331,863,358 visits — a record. The system has become a model that countries around the world have copied. Every park unit, from Yellowstone's geysers to the Statue of Liberty to Stonewall National Monument to the Manzanar Japanese American internment site, exists because the United States decided as a nation that some things are not for sale.

That consensus is now being broken.

The idea that ordinary people could own breathtaking landscapes collectively, as a public inheritance, was an American invention. In 1872, Congress passed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, setting aside 1.2 million acres in the territories of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law on March 1, 1872. There had never been anything like it anywhere on Earth.

The park's stated purpose: "a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." The act broke with the entire prior history of public land policy in the American West, which had been to transfer land into private ownership as quickly as possible. Yellowstone was the first time the United States said: this stays.

The early decades were brutal. The first superintendent, Nathaniel Langford, was given no salary, no funding, and no staff. Poachers nearly wiped out the bison. Vandals broke up geological formations and sold the pieces. The U.S. Cavalry had to take over Yellowstone's protection in 1886. Other parks followed — Sequoia in 1890, Yosemite (briefly under California control, then federal) in 1890, Mount Rainier in 1899, Crater Lake in 1902, Glacier in 1910 — each with its own management or no management at all. There was no system.

The Organic Act, drafted in part by Stephen Mather and Horace Albright with influence from John Muir's writings, gave the new National Park Service its founding charter. The act answered the question that had divided conservationists and commercial interests for forty years: could the resources inside national parks be exploited? The answer was no. Future generations were promised the same parks the founders had seen.

The National Park Service is far more than the 63 designated "national parks." It manages 433 distinct units — national monuments, battlefields, historic sites, seashores, lakeshores, scenic riverways, scenic trails, parkways, recreation areas, memorials, and military parks. Many are familiar: Yosemite, Glacier, the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial. Others are extraordinary because of what they preserve: the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail. Manzanar, where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Stonewall, where the modern LGBTQ rights movement began. The Trail of Tears.

The Park Service preserves the cultural and historical memory of the United States — the good, the bad, and the contested. It maintains 75,000 archaeological sites, 27,000 historic structures, and 167 million museum and library items. It runs the largest archive of historic photographs in the world. Park Service rangers don't just point at scenery; they teach the history of slavery at battlefield sites, the genocide of Native peoples at preserved villages, the civil rights movement at the homes and churches where it happened.

Within days of taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration began dismantling the agency. The "Fork in the Road" email from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), pressuring federal workers to resign or take buyouts, swept through the National Park Service in the first 100 days. The agency lost approximately 2,400 employees — about 12% of its workforce — to that initial wave alone. Then in February 2025, what employees came to call the Valentine's Day Massacre saw approximately 1,000 NPS workers fired by the Department of the Interior in a single day.

By July 2025, the National Parks Conservation Association reported that the NPS had lost 24% of its permanent staff in the seven months since Trump took office. By July 13, 2025, TIME Magazine confirmed the figure: a staggering reduction that left parks across the country scrambling to operate with bare-bones crews.

Then came the budget. In May 2025, the Trump administration released its 2026 budget proposal, which called for cutting more than $1 billion from the National Park Service — what the National Parks Conservation Association described as the largest cut to the agency's budget in its 109-year history. Theresa Pierno, NPCA President: "This is the most extreme, unrealistic and destructive National Park Service budget a President has ever proposed in the agency's 109-year history. It's nothing less than an all-out assault on America's national parks."

Congress rejected the 2026 cuts and approved $3.267 billion for NPS instead — preserving the agency at near-2024 levels. Then in April 2026, the administration came back with the FY2027 budget proposal: another 37% cut, plus an additional 3,000 NPS positions to be eliminated. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), in the April 23, 2026 hearing: "You're proposing a 38% cut to parks facilities, operation and maintenance — these are the road crews, things like that — a 35% cut for support staff, and over 50% of funding for resource stewardship. To me, that is just a recipe for disaster for our parks."

The administration's stated rationale is "efficiency." Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has emphasized boosting "American energy independence" and serving "the American taxpayer." A May 2025 budget brief proposed a foreign-visitor surcharge expected to generate over $90 million annually — a measure that has bipartisan support and is not, in itself, controversial.

But the budget proposal goes further. It includes language that would turn some national park sites over to states and remove them from the National Park System entirely — an unprecedented divestment. The administration's 2027 proposal cuts park operations by 38%, support staff by 35%, and resource stewardship by over 50%, while requesting a $1.5 trillion defense budget — the largest in modern US history.

At the April 23, 2026 Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Secretary Burgum was unable or unwilling to answer basic questions. He could not state how many national park superintendent positions were vacant. He was not tracking the number of wildfire-certified personnel who had left the Department of the Interior because of DOGE actions. The agency that protects 84 million acres of American land could not tell Congress how many of its most senior leaders remained.

The National Park Service is one of the most bipartisan institutions in American government. It was created by a Democratic president (Wilson) under the lobbying of a Republican-aligned conservation movement. Theodore Roosevelt — Republican — used the Antiquities Act in 1906 to declare 18 national monuments, four national game refuges, and 51 bird sanctuaries. Calvin Coolidge — Republican — expanded the parks. Franklin Roosevelt — Democrat — used the Civilian Conservation Corps to build the modern infrastructure of every park. Eisenhower — Republican — added millions of visitors with the National Highway System. Kennedy and Johnson — Democrats — added the Wilderness Act of 1964 and dozens of seashores. Nixon — Republican — created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, and expanded the parks system. Reagan — Republican — defended NPS budgets despite his deregulatory agenda. Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden — three Democrats and one Republican — collectively oversaw record growth in park acreage and protections.

The current administration is the first in NPS's 109-year history to propose its largest budget cut in real or inflation-adjusted dollars. It is the first to propose removing existing units from the system. It is the first to demand that the agency reveal whether 24% staff loss is just the beginning.

Every visitor who pays $35 to drive into Zion, Yosemite, or Acadia is told the money supports the parks. In 2026 a large share of it did not. Reporting by The Hill and the Salt Lake Tribune in late May found that the National Park Service directed at least $60–67 million in park funds toward Donald Trump's "beautification" projects in Washington, D.C. ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary. By early June the accounting had grown: roughly $90 million in park entrance fees funneled into fireworks, fountains, and a statue for the semiquincentennial.

The number that matters most is the one left over. National parks outside Washington received $27 million total to share for 2026 costs — and were warned they would not have access to the federal contingency fund normally built from 20% of the fees the parks collect each year. Four hundred thirty-three sites, eighty-four million acres, $27 million. Meanwhile the system carries a $35.4 billion deferred maintenance backlog: the crumbling roads, failing water systems, and closed trails that every budget hearing invokes and no budget fixes.

The Trust for the National Mall was established in 2007 as a nonpartisan nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, dedicated to preserving the National Mall and the White House grounds. In October 2025 — during a record government shutdown, and days after Trump demolished the entire East Wing of the White House — five senators wrote to the Trust and to the NPS to ask whether it had become something else entirely.

Senators Warren, Blumenthal, Wyden, Van Hollen, and Markey described the Trust as having become "a vehicle for politicized fundraising, influence peddling, and donor access to President Trump," channeling donations toward his $300 million White House ballroom. Their concern was specific: "the risk of quid-pro-quo arrangements in which large corporations get backroom favors from the White House and President Trump gets his multi-million-dollar ballroom — all while American families face rising prices during a government shutdown."

The example they led with is hard to improve on. On September 29, 2025, YouTube settled a lawsuit brought by Trump by agreeing to pay $22 million to the Trust — for the ballroom. Two weeks later the President hosted a black-tie White House dinner for dozens of executives from companies with business before his administration. In February 2026, Warren and Rep. Robert Garcia followed up, asking NPS directly whether the agency "has facilitated corruption" in connection with the project. A federal judge had already expressed skepticism, in January, that Trump possessed the legal authority to proceed with the construction at all.

In June 2026 the Department of Homeland Security issued a waiver notice setting aside decades of environmental law in order to build barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors through Big Bend National Park — one of the most remote, wild, and least-crossed stretches of the entire southern border. The Center for Biological Diversity sued DHS on June 11, arguing the waiver was unconstitutional.

Laiken Jordahl, a national public lands advocate at the Center and a former Park Service employee who worked at Big Bend, put it plainly: "These horrific plans are an affront to the millions of Americans who treasure Big Bend. Politicians who've never set foot here are signing a death warrant for this wild and beautiful place." On the question of whether announced plans could be trusted to stay announced, he was blunter: "They are just statements. They could show up with bulldozers and dynamite trucks and start building in the state park tomorrow. And nothing could stop them."

The barriers themselves invite the obvious question. The proposed structures in Big Bend are roughly four feet tall, with gaps wide enough for wildlife — or people — to pass through, and non-contiguous, meaning anyone can simply walk around them. Separately, Customs and Border Protection has been preparing to build an actual 30-foot steel wall across roughly 175 miles of Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, and Presidio counties.

Beginning January 1, 2026, the America the Beautiful annual park pass — the $80 card that gets a family into every national park in the country — began carrying an image of Donald Trump, over legal objections. Some visitors planned a quiet response: cover the photograph with a sticker. Watercolor artist Jenny McCarty began selling stickers featuring national park scenes, describing them as protest and as an attempt to restore what she saw as the pass's original purpose.

The Interior Department responded by updating its "Void if Altered" rules for 2026 to explicitly flag stickers and other coverings as alterations that could invalidate the pass. In practical terms: a family that covers the President's face on a pass they already paid for can be turned away at the entrance gate of a park they already own.

Did Congress cut the National Park Service budget? No. Congress rejected Trump's proposed $1 billion cut for FY2026 and held operations funding roughly flat at $2.88 billion, with the agency receiving about $3.27 billion overall — roughly $1.15 billion more than the administration requested. The FY2027 request proposes the cut again.

Where do national park entrance fees go? They are supposed to fund park operations and maintenance. In 2026, roughly $90 million in park fees was directed instead to Washington, D.C. projects tied to the nation's 250th anniversary — fireworks, fountains, and a statue — leaving about $27 million for all parks outside D.C. to share.

Is there a border wall being built through Big Bend National Park? DHS issued a waiver in June 2026 setting aside environmental laws to allow barriers, roads, lighting, cameras and sensors in Big Bend. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing. The proposed barriers are about four feet tall, gapped, and non-contiguous.

Why is Trump's picture on the America the Beautiful pass? The image began appearing on passes January 1, 2026. Interior then updated its "Void if Altered" rules to specify that stickers or coverings may invalidate the pass — after artists began selling stickers designed to cover the image in protest.

How many NPS staff have been cut? Roughly 24% of Park Service staff were lost during 2025 through the DOGE reductions and the February layoffs, even as the system hosted more than 330 million visits.