National Park Service Maintenance Backlog Now Totals Over $35 Billion

Trump administration causes single largest increase in damages to national parks, ever, in only its first year in office

Testifying in front of the House of Representatives on Monday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum revealed that the maintenance backlog in national parks now totals over $35 billion. This is the first time we’ve gotten an estimate on the increase to the backlog caused by the Trump administration’s first year in office. The backlog stood at around $23 billion at the end of FY2024.

Republicans have been forcing a fail-by-design plan onto the park service for decades. That agency manages 85 million acres of our nation’s most valuable, visited, and fragile public lands, and our most important historic sites, yet the administration’s budget for FY2027 proposes slashing over $1 billion from its already inadequate $3.3 billion annual budget.

To put that budget in perspective, the entirety of the National Park Service uses in an entire year the equivalent of about a day-and-a-half of what the war in Iran costs taxpayers.

How has the administration managed to add $12 billion to the backlog in just a single year? Four main reasons:

1. Efforts to address the backlog were already underfunded. Even before Trump and his stooges entered office, the backlog was already expanding faster than supposed efforts to address it were able to mitigate.

2. NPS lost around 4,000 staff, or 24 percent of its full-time workforce, to DOGE RIFs and other cuts last year. Much of the maintenance in national parks is performed during summer months by seasonal hires, and efforts to staff up those operations last year were also sabotaged by the administration.

3. Leaving national parks open but understaffed during government shutdowns results in massive amounts of damage. The problem is so bad that officials from both Trump administrations have attempted to cover up the totals. At 43 days, last year’s shutdown was the longest ever.

4. Visitation is booming. At 332 million visitors, 2024 set the all-time record, and last year was a close second. More people equals more wear and tear, but the administration is responding by reducing rather than increasing maintenance budgets.

What’s included in the maintenance backlog? It’s tempting to think of it in terms of potholes, since roads in national parks have become so bad in recent years, but the problem includes everything from trail erosion to rusting water pipes. And all of this neglected maintenance absolutely impacts visitor safety. System-wide, there’s 17,000 miles of trails in need of work, 5,500 miles of road, and thousands of buildings and water systems that are slowly crumbling. All of this reduces the quality of the visitor experience, creates traffic and falling hazards, and results in environmental degradation as wastewater leaks into park water sources.

Exposing park visitors to those risks is a deliberate decision being made by the administration, as part of its plan to privatize park service operations.

The Trump administration alone is not to blame here. Leaders from across the political spectrum have failed to meet the scale of the challenge, even while taking advantage of it for campaign messaging.

Case in point: the Great American Outdoors Act, which passed with bipartisan fanfare in 2020, dedicated about $1.3 billion annually in offshore oil and gas royalties to the park service’s backlog over five years. But, despite all the victory laps from politicians on both sides of the aisle, that backlog still increased from about $14 billion to over $23 billion during that time.

Now, that five-year Legacy Restoration Fund has expired, and the proposal being put forward to replace it actually reduces funding by 15 percent.

All of this is, of course, stupid and short sighted. Every dollar invested in national parks nets taxpayers $18 in economic output. That’s such a good return on investment that it’s only eclipsed by ROI on other types of public land. But, rather than spending our money wisely on something that all Americans can agree is important, the administration is instead proposing pulling money from national parks in order to buy more bombs.

If you are able to afford to visit a national park this summer, and that visit results in a flat tire after you hit a pot hole, or a nasty case of diarrhea after you drink the water, remember that the money we could have spent preventing that stuff is instead being spent dropping bombs on schoolgirls halfway around the world.

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.