Like a cinnamon river overflowing its banks, thousands of elk have been making their way across Jackson Hole, Wyo., to their summer range below the high, jagged peaks of Grand Teton National Park.
This is one of the world’s most spectacular migrations, protected by the creation and expansion over the last half century of what is now a 485-square-mile park. As the weather has warmed, cars and vans carrying tourists from far and wide have been lining the roads, watching and photographing the elk and keeping an eye out for wolves, bears, moose, deer, bison and pronghorn antelope.
With more than 3.6 million visitors last year, Grand Teton is one of the most popular national parks. In 2023, the $738 million spent by these tourists in nearby hotels, restaurants and shops supported more than 9,300 regional jobs — not a bad return for a park that runs on a budget of about $15 million a year.
The pattern is similar across America. That same year, the most recent for which figures are available, the 325 million visitors to national parks, monuments and historic sites spent an estimated $26.4 billion in surrounding communities. Visits to the parks swelled last year to a record of nearly 332 million.
These figures should come as no surprise. Americans love their national parks and visit them avidly. Last year, the National Park Service received the highest rating of all federal agencies in a survey by the independent Pew Research Center, with 76 percent of respondents viewing the agency favorably.
Clearly, America’s national parks have been a golden goose. The question now is whether President Trump will gut them in his effort to slash federal spending. Even before he took office, the Park Service was running lean, on a slim operating budget of about $3 billion. But since January, an estimated 13 percent of its staff has departed through pressured buyouts, early retirements and deferred resignations.
And the outlook for the national parks next year is especially grim. Mr. Trump has proposed hacking the Park Service’s operating budget by roughly 30 percent, which would be catastrophic, and transferring less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states and tribal governments. Theresa Pierno, the president of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, has warned that the system “would be completely decimated” should such cuts be imposed.
The group estimated that reducing the operating budget by $900 million, as the Trump administration wants to do, would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service.
Should anything even remotely like that come to pass, we would be witnessing the dismantling of a century-old system that has protected majestic scenery and places of ecological or historical importance from development. It has been a model of stewardship of landscapes that belong to all Americans, and it has been emulated around the world.
By April, the effects of reduced staffing reportedly had been felt. Arches National Park in Utah had terminated some of its ranger-led tours. Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado had closed on Mondays and Tuesdays for lack of staff. Pinnacles National Park in California had canceled its summer ranger programs. Great Smoky Mountains National Park had closed several campground and picnic areas. And the list went on.
The Trump administration, perhaps sensitive to blowback from the millions of visitors who will descend on the parks this summer, has given the Park Service permission to hire up to 7,700 seasonal employees. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who oversees the Park Service, has also ordered the agency to ensure that its parks and other sites “provide the best customer service experience for all visitors.” Earlier in the year, he had fired about 1,000 probationary park employees as part of the administration’s effort to shrink government to, as he described it, the “right size,” only to be ordered by a federal judge to reinstate them.
This patchwork fix may mean that visitors won’t be especially shortchanged this summer, at least in the most visited parks — stuck in long lines to enter, frustrated at understaffed visitor centers and missing out on nature tours and talks offered by park rangers. What visitors will face next summer will depend on the extent to which Mr. Trump eviscerates the Park Service budget.
There is more at stake, however, than whether tourists have seamless visits. As 18 former top Park Service officials pointed out to Mr. Burgum in a recent letter, the 1916 law that created the agency prioritizes the protection of the parks’ natural resources over the services it offers to visitors. Those former officials expressed concern that park managers are essentially being forced “to ignore their park resource protection responsibilities in favor of providing for visitor services.”
Their concerns aren’t exaggerated. Numerous scientific studies of wildlife in the national parks already have been terminated or put in jeopardy — from controlling invasive species like rats to assessing the status of native plants and animals, restoring damaged habitats, and measuring how climate change is affecting ecological diversity. With the departure of many of the researchers who conduct these studies, the Park Service’s institutional memory will be eroded and may be difficult if not impossible to restore.
Yet when I reached out to the superintendents of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, their nonprofit partners, Yellowstone Forever and the Grand Teton National Park Foundation, as well as two local wildlife biologists, to ask their thoughts on the president’s cuts and proposed cuts, they either declined to speak to me for publication or did not return my calls.
Against this backdrop, it’s instructive to compare Mr. Trump’s plans for the parks to those of another extremely wealthy New Yorker: John D. Rockefeller Jr. A financier and philanthropist, Rockefeller purchased and donated land that helped to create or expand Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia, Shenandoah and Grand Teton National Parks. He provided more than $1.6 million in 1930 — roughly $30 million today — to save 15,000 acres of sugar pines adjacent to Yosemite that were going to be logged, and he financed the construction of museums in Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Parks. His heart was devoted to the commonweal, and he used his money to enhance it.
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, seems bent on eroding one of the country’s greatest achievements, a national park system open to all. As the Western writer Wallace Stegner once put it, the national parks are “absolutely American” and “the best idea we ever had. “
Will the millions of Americans who cherish their parks allow Mr. Trump to destroy them?
Ted Kerasote has written about nature and wildlife since the 1970s. He is the author of “Out There: In the Wild in a Wired Age.”
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