The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.
But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.
This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from National Parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from National Parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. “I’m so proud of Washington, D.C.,” Trump said Wednesday during a meeting in the Oval Office with the secretary-general of NATO. “It’s become one of the hottest cities in the world.”
But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”
“The president is prioritizing D.C. at the expense of parks throughout the country,” Emily Douce, a lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “There is $24 billion of maintenance needs throughout the National Park Service system, and adding these new vanity projects just adds to the need.”
The dozens of pages of budgetary documentation show an $854 million, or 68 percent, decrease in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. That includes a $235 million decrease in spending in Pacific West parks such as Yosemite, a $254 million decrease in the Intermountain Region parks such as Yellowstone, and a $33 million decrease in Alaska. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million, not counting about $310 million in donations that the Park Service received from allies of the president, most of which is going to fund a new White House ballroom.
Park Service staff have been told, in some cases, that their 2026 projects are being defunded because the Trump administration has prioritized America’s 250th birthday and other programs. A Park Service employee who was not authorized to speak publicly told me that some parks and projects have had “nearly 70 percent of their approved anticipated project funds pulled back,” forcing them to delay making crucial repairs to historic structures, hiring interns, and ensuring that trails are wheelchair accessible. “It means that signage and exhibits won’t be improved,youth programs can’t be offered, that a trail is not improved,” the employee said.
In response to my request for comment, a Department of the Interior spokesperson criticized spending by Barack Obama in his first term and boasted about collecting $2.4 million more in park fees during the first three months of this year by raising prices on foreign visitors. “The National Park Service has not only been focused on beautifying the district for the 250th celebrations in our nation’s capital but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country,” the spokesperson, whom the department would not identify, said in a statement.
The White House did not respond to a question about the source of funding for the new West Colonnade paving stones.
A memo distributed in March on behalf of the parks director, Jessica Bowron, warned employees of an “all-hands-on deck approach” for the semiquincentennial events that might make vacation time impossible over the summer. She also made clear that the employees may be required to take leave of their assigned posts for the events. “Resource sharing across parks and regions will be essential, and some staff may be called upon to support incident management teams or other mission-critical assignments,” the memo announced.
Earlier this month, about 400 staff from approximately 180 parks had been redeployed to the Washington region for various tasks related to the nation’s 250th celebrations, according to documents that I obtained. By this week, it had grown to about 450 staff from more than 200 parks. The cost of this deployment was not calculated in the documents. But under the park system’s policies, home parks continue to pay for the eight-hour work days of their redeployed staff, while additional costs such as transportation, overtime, hotels, and a per diem are shouldered by other service accounts.
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That loss of staffing comes as many parks are already operating with fewer employees. The Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its staff since Trump returned to office in 2025 because of terminations, early retirements, and a federal buyout initiated by the Trump administration, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. The Interior Department spokesperson did not dispute the major staffing cuts but attacked the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan group that advocates for increased national-park funding, for not donating a greater share of its revenue directly to the park system and for its current CEO’s public support of Vice President Harris in the last election.
Trump has proposed reducing the staff at National Parks even more. His 2027 budget proposes cutting 3,967 full-time employees, a 31 percent reduction from the 2025 staffing level. The proposal is not popular on Capitol Hill, and unlikely to make it into law. Last month, the Senate rejected Trump’s request for $1 billion for “security enhancements” to the East Wing as it is reconstructed to make way for a new ballroom; Trump had tried to include that funding in an immigration-enforcement supplemental bill. The supplemental request to pay for the Iran war, which was released this week, includes $500 million in Park Service funding for D.C. projects such as a new seawall on the Potomac River. Trump’s 2027 budget calls for $10 billion to continue to beautify the Washington area—a request that was nearly eight times as large as all National Park Service project spending in 2025. In late May, Republicans on the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Interior budget marked up a version of the president’s budget for consideration by the full committee. Trump’s $10 billion was not included.
In April, Senator Angus King of Maine questioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about how the money would be spent. Burgum said it would not go to new projects, such as the 250-foot memorial arch Trump plans to build on the Potomac. But he did not offer details on what projects in the area would require so much funding. “D.C. is like a state, and it’s not just the National Mall,” Burgum said. “It is for the greater capital region.”
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Many of the president’s projects are not onetime expenses, but will require increased funding on an ongoing basis. National Parks managers in March approved using $32,095 from a maintenance account to care for the statues that Trump installed in his retrofitted Rose Garden. “The scope may be expanded in the future to include maintenance of any additional statues that are installed in the garden,” the budget document stated. “Work includes cleaning, waxing, inspection for damage, and minor conservation treatments as needed.”
When Trump began his renovation of the White House complex last year, the president said that he and his donors would bear the cost of his dreams. The Trust for the National Mall raised money to pave over the Rose Garden and put marble in the nearby Palm Room, a way station between the president’s residence and the West Colonnade. But the details of the spending, including price tags and the identity of the donors, have been murky. There are a number of other renovation and decorating projects with no public accounting of the costs: Trump’s marbling of a bathroom in the residence, his relocation of a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the Oval Office, his addition of gold filigree to the walls and coins on many of the internal doors.
Then there’s the most expensive project, the demolition of the East Wing to make way for a ballroom. Trump has been adamant that the new ballroom would not cost the American people anything. “We didn’t ask for any tax money. This is taxpayer free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump said on April 1. “The ballroom is a donation.” To date, $300 million of donations have been transferred to the National Park Service for the ballroom, according to the internal Park Service budget documents. But taxpayers will still likely need to chip in to pay for the broader project.
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Recently unearthed contractor documents, revealed by The Washington Post, describe the true cost of the East Wing reconstruction as closer to $600 million, with more than half coming from taxpayer-funded accounts managed by the White House Military Office and the Secret Service. The White House budget office released $351.6 million to the Secret Service this month, a transfer first reported by Roll Call. The White House has not confirmed the purpose of the funds, but the transfer happened after senators refused a White House request for $1 billion in funding for the Secret Service for security enhancements at the White House, including the East Wing project. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle described the East Wing project in a statement as “inextricably tied to the security of the President,” and said Trump was coordinating with “the White House Military Office and the United States Secret Service” on design and planning. Ingle said the president and his allies would fund the East Wing project “to the tune of approximately $400 million.”
The next projects on Trump’s agenda also lack clear funding sources or a defined budget. In addition to the memorial arch, Trump intends to rebuild the East Potomac golf course and install a new sculpture garden, and has floated plans to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, to match the West Wing next door. None of these projects has yet been added to the Park Service budget documents I reviewed.
Another project that is taking shape will be paid for by private donations with supervision by federal park officials: Trump plans to install a new landing pad on the South Lawn of the White House, which would allow the latest model of the president’s Marine One helicopter to take off without burning the grass. According to the budget documents, the project will be funded by a $5 million donation from defense contractor Lockheed Martin—the maker of the new helicopter.
The post A White House Makeover, Brought to You by Struggling National Parks appeared first on The Atlantic.
