W Tyson Joye / Public Domain
When I set out on a family road trip this year, I wanted my kids to experience the wonder of our national parks, from the golden trails of Shenandoah to the star-filled skies of Great Sand Dunes. But what I saw -- and wrote about recently in The Hill -- is that the very promise of our parks is under attack.
- Read my op-ed in The Hill: Trump is using the shutdown to try and gut national parks
Right now, the Trump administration is using the government shutdown to weaken the National Park Service, defund public lands agencies, and lay the groundwork for privatizing public lands.
The impacts are already visible:
- For staff: Rangers are being furloughed or laid off, and those remaining are covering impossible workloads, from emergency response to visitor management, with fewer resources and less support.
- For visitors: Many campgrounds and visitor centers are shuttered, trails are unmaintained, and safety responses are slower or nonexistent. Families are being turned away or left without guidance.
- For youth: programs that connect students and kids to national parks, such as Junior Rangers and Conservation Corps, are being cancelled at parks around the country due to lack of staff and agency funding.
- For our public lands: Overflowing trash, vandalism, damaged ecosystems, and illegal activity are on the rise -- all while the oversight and enforcement needed to protect these places are being gutted.
The Trump administration is using the government shutdown as cover to dismantle the very agencies that safeguard our public lands -- from the National Park Service to the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum is signaling that he wants to keep operating the Interior Department on a skeleton staff -- cutting rangers, scientists, educators, and land managers who are essential to protecting our parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and other public lands. At the same time, the Interior Department continues to move polluting projects forward to line the pockets of corporations and billionaires.
If this plan moves forward, the consequences will be devastating: fewer people to prevent wildfires, patrol sensitive habitats, manage recreation safely, and ensure Indigenous and community voices are represented in public land decisions.
We’ve already seen what happens when our agencies are starved of staff and funding: overflowing trash, damaged trails, closed campgrounds, vandalism, and irreplaceable harm to ecosystems. Now, the administration wants to make that the new normal.
Let’s make sure our public lands remain public, protected, and for everyone. We need your help telling your members of Congress to stop the Trump administration from hollowing out the Interior Department and turning our shared lands into playgrounds for private interests.
- Take action: Tell Congress to defend our public lands
The truth is clear: our parks were never meant to be profit centers. They are places of history, healing, and belonging -- and they belong to all of us. We should strive to make them more accessible to marginalized communities, children, veterans, and people from all walks of life.