Where National Parks And Public Lands Stand Now, As Trump Administration Prepares To Privatize

All signs point to a mass sell-off, as park service begins to fail and private equity circles

Despite our recent victory in fighting to remove the sell-off of million acres of public land from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration is still proceeding headlong with its plan for something much worse. Let’s check in on where national parks and other public lands stand right now, and look at how the Department of the Interior is gearing up to destroy them.

“Doug Burgum [the Secretary of the Interior] is telling you what his plan is,” Jayson O'Neill, spokesperson for Save our Parks, a pro-public lands advocacy group, told me yesterday. “Believe him.”

This week, Save Our Parks published research on the current state of public lands. This reporting is drawn from that research.

The Current State Of Parks And Public Lands

Since January 20th, the administration has cut 24 percent of full-time staff at the National Park Service and has only filled 56 percent of seasonal positions.

Additionally, Kevin Heatley, the former Superintendent of Crater Lake National Park, told PBS last month that nearly 100 superintendent positions at NPS’s 433 sites are currently unfilled, leaving almost one-quarter of national park sites without a leader.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act also rescinds $267 million of Biden-era funding targeted at supporting staffing levels in national parks. So the problem will get worse next year, regardless of any other actions taken by the administration.

“The staff is being decimated right now,” retired national park superintendent Bob Krumenaker told Time Magazine last month. “The morale is as bad as it has ever been. The big issue is it would appear that this Administration is systematically destroying the workforce and the values of the National Park System that are really important to the American people.”

The situation is also bad at the Forest Service, which is managed by the Department of Agriculture. 3,000 jobs were cut there in February, and ProPublica reporting reveals that 4,500 firefighting jobs remain vacant at the Forest Service, despite claims by agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins that the agency has met its hiring goals.

Last month, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had temporarily halted mass reductions in force across federal agencies. In the wake of that ruling, more layoffs are expected at the Bureau of Land Management, United States Fish and Wildlife Serve, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Reclamation, and more.

Visitor Safety Is Being Compromised

Despite limited staffing, Burgum has ordered that all national park trails, features and attractions must remain open, unless a closure is approved personally by the Secretary of the Interior. This comes as visitation to national parks exceeds records. What’s giving?

In May, Grand Canyon National Park began notifying visitors that, due to staff reductions, search are rescue operations there would be delayed.

“Hikers and backpackers—especially those attempting rim-to-rim or other strenuous routes — should be self-reliant,” the park cautioned. 310 people on average are rescued in the Grand Canyon each year.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs is demanding an investigation into the administration’s response to a wildfire that destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge last month. Going against standard NPS procedure, press and photographers—even those carrying wildfire safety certifications and gear—were kept outside the Dragon Bravo Fire’s perimeter, limiting the information the public received about the destruction of its resources.

“Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park,” Hobbs stated on Twitter. “I am calling on the federal government for a comprehensive and independent investigation into the management of the fire and a report detailing the decisions that led to this devastating outcome.”

In the wake of the fire, Democrat Arizona Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego wrote to Burgum asking the secretary to clarify how he plans to manage wildfire decision making as the administration works to consolidate federal firefighting operations into a single agency, in what appears to be an attempt by Senator Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) to save his failing aerospace business.

Similar problems are evident in other national parks. A former ranger in Glacier National Park told the Washington Post, “There will be delayed response to emergency events. I wouldn’t say if. I would say when.” Ranger-led tours in that park have been reduced by one-third compared to last year.

In Yosemite, IT workers and scientists have been re-tasked to cleaning bathrooms, following the elimination of that park’s custodial staff. Due to those cuts, Yosemite visitors are no longer able to pick up wilderness permits at the Hetch Hetchy entrance, campground reservations are being delayed, and the only locksmith was terminated, leading to safety and security concerns.

Colorado’s Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument has been forced to close on Mondays and Tuesdays, due to inadequate staffing. Arizona’s Saguaro National Park is closing its visitor centers on Mondays. Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park has reduced the number of people who can take a tour of its caves daily by 500. Zion National Park in Utah has replaced some bathrooms with portable toilets, since those can more cheaply be serviced by third party contractors.

And more significant safety concerns are also being created. In Washington’s North Cascades National Park, which recently began efforts to bring back grizzly bears, the wildlife biologist responsible for preventing human-bear conflicts was laid off. At Assateague Island National Seashore, which straddles the Maryland-Virginia border, a teenage swimmer drowned just weeks after Maryland lawmakers called on the administration to restore lifeguard staffing to adequate levels.

“I’ve been visiting national parks for 30 years and never has the presence of rangers been so absent,” a visitor to Zion National Park told CNN.

It’s Going To Get Worse

In May, the White House published its budget proposal for FY2026, which included cutting the NPS budget by a further 38 percent next year. That money would have come from:

• A $900 million reduction to park operations.

• $158 million from historic preservation.

• $77 million from wildlife.

• $73 million from maintenance.

Theresa Pierno, President and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association called the budget, “the most extreme, unrealistic and destructive National Park Service budget a President has ever proposed in the agency’s 109-year history.”

The budget also called for the “transfer” of an unspecified number of national park sites to state management. As we’ve discussed here at length before, many state constitutions preclude the ability to manage formerly-federal public lands. With state constitutional requirements for both profit and balanced budgets, claims of a “transfer” are simply code for sell-offs.

Pierno ran the math, and warned as many as 350 national park sites could be lost.

Speaking to PBS, Ken Yager, President and Founder of the Yosemite Climbing Association, laid things out clearly: “I think the endgame is to get rid of the Park Service. If you can make them so poorly organized and so poorly run that people don’t want the Park Service, it will be that much easier for them to say, ‘Hey, let’s defund the Park Service, and we will just take a percentage of the concessionaire.’”

Such a move has significant, if currently below-the-radar support in Congress. Just last month, in a vote that temporarily blocked the White House’s proposed sell-offs and budget cuts, Republican senators still proposed slashing NPS’s budget by 5 percent.

And obviously we have Senator Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) effort to sell 3.3 million acres of BLM and USFS land, and to authorize the future sale of hundreds of millions of acres more, which he was forced to withdraw in June. As all that was making headlines, I drew heat from conservative-leaning public lands non-profits for connecting the name of Senator Steve Daines (R-Montana) to that effort. But, speaking to O’Neill yesterday, he revealed an off-the-record source that confirmed my original reports.

“Daines wanted to see how far a sell-off could go, without having his name connected to it,” O’Neill told me, citing a source close to the senator. He went on to caution that Daines’ attempts to greenwash his image through performative legislation should not distract from the larger picture that both he and other mainstream Republicans are prepared to pursue the sale of public lands, if and when it can be messaged in such a way that it won’t cost them a significant number of voters.

O’Neill also points out that these efforts align with William Perry Pendley’s goal in the chapter on public lands he authored for Project 2025. During its first six months in power, the administration has achieved 47 percent of the goals laid out in that manifesto, according to the Project 2025 Tracker.

Staffing Reveals Direction

Even as reductions in force decimate land management agencies, it appears as if Burgum is staffing up at DOI headquarters in pursuit of a specific goal.

In April, Burgum signed an order handing over effective control of DOI to DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, formerly the CEO of a Houston-based oil company.

Recent reporting in the New York Times indicates that Hassen may have left the agency, but O’Neill tells me that’s incorrect, and that while Hassen may be stepping back from daily management duties following controversy around his appointment, he remains involved behind the scenes, and continues to work to reduce staffing at the agencies DOI manages.

On August 1, Burgum also signed an order appointing Kevin Lilly, an investment banker from Houston with no conservation experience, as acting Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. In late June, Lilly himself stated that he had already been hired to the position, which was only formally announced after leaks reported by SFGate. That order also appointed former oil and gas lobbyist William Grofy as the acting Director of the BLM.

These “acting” appointments to leadership roles reserved for people who have passed Senate confirmation mirrors actions taken during the first Trump administration, which enabled grossly unqualified political operatives to illegally hold leadership roles at major public land management agencies when it was obvious they’d never be approved by the senate.

Such actions also point in one, clear direction, according to O’Neill. “This pattern of installing industry insiders and financial operatives reveals Burgum and the administration’s true intentions,” O’Neill writes. “Burgum’s approach treats America’s natural heritage as items on a corporate balance sheet rather than irreplaceable public trust resources that belong to all Americans.”

What This Adds Up To

Burgum is not hiding his intentions. Speaking at his Senate confirmation hearing, Burgum called America’s public lands, “America’s balance sheet.” And went on to estimate their total value at $200 trillion.

He followed that with a February speech in which he stated, “But in the Trump administration, we’re going to build that balance sheet, and we have trillions and trillions of dollars worth of natural resources, and we’re going to make sure that we understand that our assets far out exceed the debt that we have.”

Then, speaking in March at an oil industry conference, Burgum said, “Our national assets far exceed the $36.5 trillion in debt…just showing the markets what that number is would probably reduce the 10-year, long-term interest rate.”

Burgum then said that, if DOI were a private company, it would have the “largest balance sheet in the world.”

But DOI is not a private company, it’s an agency of the federal government charged with managing 500 million acres of land on the public’s behalf. When a private company borrows against its assets, it signs a contract allowing for those assets to be seized or surrendered in the event of non payment. With 40 percent of all federal debt held by foreigners, that could lead to other governments or even private companies incorporated abroad taking ownership of America’s public land.

In February, the Center for American Progress warned that the sale of public lands could be used to seed a sovereign wealth fund, something the President instructed be created as one of his early executive orders. Seeing that through would require massive amounts of liquid capital, something CAP sees no way to generate without a sale of public lands.

Also in March, Burgum proposed selling public land in pursuit of “affordable housing.” A goal that was transparently a lie, and would result in formerly public lands being given over to the rich for the construction of McMansions and golf courses should it go ahead.

When not discussing borrowing against public lands, using their value to negotiate loan terms, or building golf courses, Burgum is focussed supposedly on reducing the costs of operating them. “If we have an opportunity to get land back into the hands of states and let states manage it as opposed to the federal, that’s also a way for us to reduce costs,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Again, any talk of “transferring” land to states is simply code for selling that land.

O’Neill has another concern: Wildlife. North America is unique in that wildlife here is held in trust for the public and every person has an equal opportunity to participate in hunting and fishing, activities used to fund the management of that wildlife. That stands in contrast to the rest of the world, where wild animals are owned by royal families or private corporations, and access to them is sold to the highest bidder. In places like Europe or Africa, hunting and fishing are only accessible for the rich.

O’Neill connects the dots between Lilly and Hassen hailing from Texas, the only place in the United States with a broad-reaching system of private wildlife management, Burgum’s inept management of North Dakota’s wildlife during his two terms as governor of that state, along with his stated desire to turn public lands into “assets,” and sees the potential that our uniquely egalitarian access to wildlife could be replaced with for-profit management intended to raise massive amounts of money.

Why?

I’ll answer this the same way every time I’m asked: The reason why the Trump administration wants to destroy our nation’s natural heritage is simple: greed. Burgum is in the pocket of the oil and gas industries, which seek to profit from expanded access to America’s public lands.

Burgum owns land in North Dakota which Continental Resources and Hess Corp lease to conduct extensive oil drilling operations. John Hess donated $25,000 to Burgum’s 2016 campaign for governor and the oil and gas industry was the top donor to both campaigns, donating more than $100,000 to Burgum through both those campaigns and his inaugural committee.

Burgum’s wife owns between $106,000 and $246,000 in stock in oil and gas companies.

And, in April 2024, Burgum set up a meeting between then-candidate Trump and oil and gas CEOs in which the latter famously solicited $1 billion donations in return for promising to deregulate that industry. It worked.

But this is all very complicated way to explain something very simple. O’Neill asks rhetorically:“Why would one real estate developer appoint another real estate developer-slash-tech bro to oversee property? And why would that real estate developer-slash-tech bro hire oil CEOs and private equity guys to help him? The answer is obvious: They’re going to try and sell our birthright.”

Want to do something to fight attempts to steal public land, dismantle national parks, and destroy the environment? Want to go further outdoors while better enjoying the experience? Upgrading to a paid subscription helps independent journalism change minds, and buys personal access to Wes, who will use his experience and his extensive network of subject matter experts to guide your gear purchases, help plan your trips, and save you money. You can read more about what Wes is doing on Substack at this link.