Just two weeks after losing 13,000 soldiers at Cold Harbor, Abraham Lincoln signed what he couldn’t have known would become one of the most consequential and long-lasting pieces of legislation of his presidency: The Yosemite Grant Act. That transferred Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove to California, “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation; shall be inalienable for all time.” It was the first time an area of land had been set aside to create any sort of state or federal park. And it couldn’t serve as a more stark contrast to the Trump administration’s latest attempt to steal from the American people.
On Friday, NOTUS reported that leadership at the Department of the Interior is pressuring the National Park Service to approve the transfer of a quarter-mile slice of Yosemite National Park to a private developer.
NOTUS:
“Since the spring of 2025, the Trump administration has been looking into ways it could cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite to a company that, through a web of limited-liability companies, is operated by real-estate developer and investment firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital. Officials are proposing the Park Service give up the land or “interest” in the land in the form of an easement, and in return receive land of equal value somewhere in California that has yet to be decided.”
“The private developers own an 83-acre plot of land just outside the western boundaries of Yosemite, about five miles from one of the park’s defining ancient sequoia groves. Jeff Pori, the CEO of Kingsbarn, wants to build a short road connecting the property to one of Yosemite’s central thoroughfares. The new road would give the land exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests.”
It’s no surprise that the beneficiaries of the transfer have significant financial ties to both the administration, and President Trump’s own criminal dealings:
“In April 2025, Kingsbarn Realty Capital closed a deal to acquire the Los Angeles headquarters of Kim Kardashian’s lingerie company Skims, working with two companies with links to the Trump administration: the Newmark Group and Hankey Capital. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick chaired the Newmark Group before entering the Trump administration, and did not fully divest from the company until May 2025. Don Hankey, the chair of Hankey Capital, is also the chair of an insurance company that underwrote Trump’s $175 million bond in his appeal in 2024 of a New York civil fraud judgment.”
“Transferring” land within the boundaries of a national park to a private entity for the purposes of commercial development is essentially unprecedented. The Department of the Interior can legally perform transfers of small areas of land, provided the American people receive equivalent value in return. But to-date, all such examples have been conducted in order to add to the public estate, not to benefit a private company.
According to NOTUS, Kingsbarn purchased the 83-acre plot of undeveloped land outside Yosemite’s western boundary for $4 million in 2024. Construction of a private entry drive from that property into the park would bring an undefined but likely enormous boost to the property’s value, allowing Kingsbarn to either develop some sort of ultra-high dollar resort, or re-sell the property to another developer for that purpose at massive profit.
It seems as if the administration hopes the “transfer” will find a property to add to the park to match the quarter-mile area of the proposed driveway, not equivalent to whatever increase in value a private entry into Yosemite would add.
Less than a decade after Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act, Congress used it as a model to protect what is now Yellowstone. President Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law in 1872, creating the world’s first national park.
That act read: “the headwaters of the Yellowstone River…is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale…and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
But most Americans lived back East, and traveling out West to visit Yellowstone or Yosemite wasn’t exactly the kind of activity a normal person could do. In 1876, travel writer Caroline Churchill estimated that the trip to and from San Francisco to Yosemite—a 167-mile journey requiring two to three days of travel by steamboat, train, then stagecoach—averaged about $150. That’s $4,105 in today’s money.
Still, Republicans continued to see real value in protecting our nation’s natural wonders.
Inspired by Grant, President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, signed legislation declaring Yosemite our nation’s third national park in 1890. Then, the next year, he created the predecessor of what is now our system of national forests by creating and signing the Forest Reserve Act.
No President is more strongly associated with our natural parks than Theodore Roosevelt. He visited Yosemite for the first time in May, 1903, to spend three days camping with John Muir.
“It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man,” he wrote of his first night sleeping under the sequoia trees in Mariposa Grove.
On his way to California, Roosevelt stopped by Yellowstone to lay the cornerstone of its new northern entrance. That still stands today, bearing an inscription drawn from Lincoln’s original Yosemite Grant Act: “For the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
In his speech dedicating the arch, Roosevelt spoke of the “essential democracy,” inherent in wild places dedicated to equality of access.
“The only way that the people as a whole can secure to themselves and their children the enjoyment in perpetuity of what the Yellowstone Park has to give is by assuming the ownership in the name of the nation and by jealously safeguarding and preserving the scenery, the forests, and the wild creatures,” Teddy said. “It must be kept for the benefit and enjoyment of all of us; and I hope to see a steadily increasing number of our people take advantage of its attractions.”
Roosevelt would go on to sign the Antiquities Act into law in 1906, giving Presidents the authority to protect areas of unusual historical or scientific interest. He then used that to protect five national monuments, the second of which—the Grand Canyon—was later declared a national park by Congress. He also signed the legislation creating five other national parks: Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Sullys Hill, North Dakota (later re-designated a game preserve); Mesa Verde, Colorado; and Platt, Oklahoma (now part of Chickasaw National Recreation Area).
Since his presidency, Teddy has been commemorated with six units in the national park system: Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in New York City, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Oyster Bay, New York, Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York, Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, and Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, DC. He’s also one of the four presidents carved from granite at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.
National Parks, especially so-called “crown jewel” units like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Glacier (created by Howard Taft, a Republican), and Yellowstone remained largely inaccessible to the general public until the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, began in 1953.
In addition to establishing the Edison Laboratory National Monument and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Monuments—both of which Congress later made national parks—and enlarging the White Sands and Capitol Reef National Monuments, Eisenhower is also responsible for creating our interstate highway system, which made cross-country travel accessible during the two-week paid vacations that American labor unions were newly negotiating for American workers.
That built on actual park infrastructure created by Franklin Roosevelt to make possible the great American road trip to see our nation’s national parks.
Today, there’s 65 units within the national parks system with “national park” in their name. 25 of those were signed into law by Republican presidents.
Also today, Republican Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has begun referring to public lands including national parks as, “assets on America’s balance sheet,” and has testified to Congress that he’d like to start selling them off. This is in addition to last year’s White House budget proposal, which expressly called for the sale of national parks, while proposing that the National Park Service budget be cut from $3.6 billion to $2.4 billion.
Since Trump entered office for the second time last January, staffing at NPS has been cut by 25 percent, both through DOGE reductions in force, and voluntary retirements and buyouts.
Former Director of the National Park Service Jon Jarvis has warned that the administration plans to, “[Take] the people’s parks and [give] them over to corporations with profit motives that will push for resort developments for the extremely wealthy and ticketed bison petting zoos for the general public.”
Now, in our nation’s first ever national park, we’re seeing the first real effort to prioritize the development of resorts reserved for the extremely wealthy.
When Burgum first took office last year, one of his first acts was to cancel the reservation system that had made traffic in parks like Yosemite (4 million annual visitors) somewhat bearable. Now, traffic jams at the main entrance can stretch past three hours.
This land “transfer” would eliminate that burden for customers of the private resort that will presumably be built on the property in question, should construction of its private entrance be approved. And that would essentially create a “traffic for thee, but not for me” situation utterly antithetical to the “essential democracy” past Republican presidents have created with our national parks.
It’s the purpose of today’s Republican Party to steal from working Americans and give to the rich. And nowhere are we seeing that embodied more strongly than in their efforts to transform America’s best idea into private petting zoos for billionaires.
A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.
This type of thing should have been nipped, forcefully, with the Yellowstone Club acquisition of the Crazy’s
And they want to tell me that concentration of the resource into the hands of the few who will dictate its use is socialism; got it. My forefathers who sweated by day and negotiated by night for that two weeks vacation must just be a bunch of socialists for wanting to take some scarce time off and go to a socialist national park. I guess it doesn’t matter; we can’t afford the gas for a cross country trip on our socialist interstates anyway. Might as well sell the US for scrap. Maybe the call girls can have a nice top down driving view of El Capitan.