This Is Trump’s Plan To Sell National Parks

"Ticketed bison petting zoos" are coming, whether the American people want them or not

Late Friday night, the White House quietly released a 1,224 page appendix to its 2026 budget proposal. While budgets are written by Congress, not the President, it still provides a detailed look inside the executive branch’s plans and priorities. This one would effectively eliminate public lands funding provided by the Great American Outdoors Act, cut a further 5,518 full-time national park employees, reduce the budget for seasonal staff by half, and bring massive budget cuts to national monuments. What’s all this add up to? Obama’s Director of the National Park Service warns the Trump administration is preparing for a sale.

“Bolstered by ‘free market acolytes’ that have long pursued the parks as unrealized business opportunities, antipathy to public service, and the absence of congressional oversight, privatizing our national parks is now in their sights,” warns Jon Jarvis, who ran the park service from 2009 until 2017, in an editorial published by The Guardian last month.

Jarvis wrote that shortly after the White House published its initial budget proposal on May 2, which I covered in this article. That budget contained an express call for a sell off, with language reading:

“The National Park Service responsibilities include 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.”

The National Park Service operates 433 “sites” covering 85 million acres nationwide. Of those, 63 have “national park” in their name. Others include battlefields, parkways, preserves, lakeshores, historic sites, and more. Federal management guarantees both the protection of these places, and public access to them. As I’ve previously explained at length, talk of “transfer” to state management is simply code for a sell-off. State management does not contain the same legal mechanisms for local input in decision making for these places, states don’t have the budgets to run them, and most state constitutions contain for-profit land management mandates that would force sell-offs.

The Trump administration’s plan to sell national parks is separate from the plan congressional Republicans are putting in place to sell off other forms of public land. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), stated yesterday that he plans to re-introduce that sell-off into the Senate budget.

Now, with Friday night’s appendix, we have details of how the White House plans to sell our national parks. Where the May 2 document was more of a topline list of priorities with some headline budget reduction targets, this much more detailed piece presents a line-by-line tabulation of cuts. And through those details, we can see the administration’s plan.

Before we proceed, a quick note on how federal budgets work: Congress writes, debates and votes on budgets as pieces of legislation that, once approved by both the House and Senate, are sent to the President for his signature. As part of that process, the executive branch assembles its own budget proposal, which it send to Congress in an effort to influence their process. And while that budget itself stands no chance of becoming enacted, it does serve as the most detailed look citizens get into what the administration’s actual policy priorities are, and their plans to achieve them.

While that May 2 budget proposal contained that call for a sale of National Park sites, and a headline budget reduction for NPS of $900 million, now that we have the actual numbers we can see that the plan is much worse. That $900 million reduction will be made to park operations alone, while a further $300 million will come from other programs, for a total cut of $1.2 billion annually.

In 2023, NPS operated on a total budget of $3.6 billion. $3 billion of that comes from taxpayers, with the rest being made up of entrance fees paid by visitors plus Land and Water Conservation Fund money, which comes from fees assessed on offshore oil and gas extraction. This is probably a good place to note that total federal spending amounts to $6.8 trillion a year right now. $3 billion represents 0.044 percent of that total. Cuts to the National Park Service will not move the needle on the deficit, tax cuts for billionaires, or anything else.

How does the administration plan to cut the NPS budget nearly in half? First, but cutting staff. This year alone, NPS has already lost 2,500 full-time employees to things like DOGE, and early retirements. The White House budget pegs FY2024 employment numbers for NPS at 13,648, and says it would like to take that to just 8,130 in FY2026. As recently as 2010, NPS had 16,037 permanent employees.

NPS augments that full-time staff with 6,000 to 7,000 seasonal hires. Those seasonal NPS employees are the people who collect entrance fees at ticket booths, perform backcountry rescue operations, repair roads, and hand other roles critical to both the visitor experience and protection of natural resources. This budget calls for cutting the budget for those hires from $80 million in FY2025, to just $39 million in FY2026.

The line item budget from late Friday night also contains measures that would divert LWCF money away from land acquisition and protection, and divert it to ongoing park maintenance. According to The Center for Western Priorities, “This would effectively rescind the Great American Outdoors Act.”

Passed in 2020, and used by a number of Republican politicians as an effective tool for greenwashing their otherwise anti-public lands records during that election cycle, GAOA obligated LWCF funding at one-fifth its intended budget, an amount that has effectively decreased every year since due to inflation. That money was intended to help reduce the maintenance backlog in national parks (which currently stands at $23.26 billion), and improve the visitor experience on public lands through land acquisitions, conservation grant programs, and the construction and maintenance of recreation facilities like parks, playgrounds, swimming areas, and trailheads. This budget proposes replacing taxpayer-funded park operations with LWCF money, essentially eliminating the point of the program, and leaving that enormous backlog to worsen.

“You can see why President Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tried to hide this budget proposal in the dead of night—it’s indefensible,” states Western Priorities deputy director Aaron Weiss. “Our national parks are already understaffed, and Burgum wants to eliminate another 5,000 positions from the Park Service alone.”

“The administration’s plan is as clear and stunning as the sun rising over the Grand Canyon,” writes Jarvis. He lays it out in seven steps:

1: “Severely slash the budget of the NPS, force retirements of dedicated and experienced NPS leaders, terminate the employment of those who refuse, cut the staffs of parks and historic sites, and replace park superintendents with political appointees ready to do the private sector’s bidding.”

2: “With failure as the goal, ignore the concerns of the public, the outdoor recreation industry, conservationists, and the communities near parks that are dependent upon visitor tourism for jobs and services.”

3: “Claim the private sector can better run the parks that the administration purposely set up to fail.”

4: “Find ways around the law, Congress and the public to eliminate the NPS and centralize control among the Doge staff embedded at the Department of the Interior.”

5: Conduct a pilot program by transferring operations at a “cash cow” park to a private company. “The real intent is to test if the public, the courts and Congress can be safely ignored,” explains Jarvis. He says Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon could be targets.

6: “Privatizing will expand to the sale, transfer or abandonment of the smaller park sites, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s home at Sagamore Hill national historic site.”

7: “[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.”

The administration is not carrying out this plan in secret.

Testifying at a senate subcommittee hearing on May 21, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (NPS is an agency within the Department of the Interior) named possible national park sites that could be sold, including: Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in New York City and Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site in North Dakota.

Burgum added that, “a battlefield site someplace,” could also be sold.

Elsewhere, the budget appendix contains plans to cut budgets for national monument and national conservation area management by 75 percent, reduce employment at the Bureau of Land Management by 22 percent, and eliminate 33 percent of jobs at the Forest Service. The same plan the White House intends to use to sell national parks could also be used to dispose of monuments, BLM land, and national forests.

“We believe that our natural resources are national assets that should be responsibly developed to grow our economy,” the interior secretary testified.

Art: John Renshawe / NPS

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports independent journalism and gives you personal access to his expertise and network, which he’ll use to help you plan trips, purchase gear, and solve problems. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link.