By Richard Lawless, Southeastern Pennsylvania Group
New Priorities
In May 2025, Secretary of the Interior Doug Borgum issued a proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year. The budget includes a 35% reduction in funding for the National Park Service (NPS), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Although proposals to sell off public lands to help balance the budget were pulled from Congress’s final budget bill after public outcry, the administration is still proposing to “transfer certain properties to state-level management.” The budget cuts are focused on recreational uses of public lands.
Secretary Borgum states that the Department of the Interior’s top priority will be supporting President Trump’s commitment to achieve “Energy Dominance.” To that end, the department will adopt the President’s mottos: “Drill, Baby, Drill” and “Mine, Baby, Mine” while leasing thousands of additional acres for oil, gas, and coal production, as well as mineral mining and logging. The department is, for example, encouraging an Australian company to mine for rare earth minerals in the Mojave National Preserve, a national park in California. In Alaska, the administration is advocating for a new 800-mile-long gas pipeline to run across the state and an industrial mining access road to run through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.
Staffing Cuts
Budget cuts could result in a 30% reduction in staffing across all the public land agencies. Cuts will focus on recreational staffing, even as public visitation continues to reach record highs. It is reported that the National Park Service has already lost nearly a quarter of its staff since the beginning of the Trump administration. In addition to the reductions of permanent staff, the hiring of seasonal staff will be greatly reduced this summer. The National Parks Conservation Association reports that as of July 3rd, only 4,500 of a planned 8,000 seasonal workers had been hired. Parks rely heavily on seasonal staff to get through their busy summer season. A lack of custodial staff in some parks may result in senior park staff being pulled from their jobs to clean bathrooms and empty trash cans. The administration proposes even greater cuts to recreational staffing at the BLM, as much as 62%. The Sierra Club has joined with the Union of Concerned Scientists, OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates, and Japanese American Citizens League to file a joint lawsuit over the "unjustified mass firings of federal workers."
Keeping The Public in The Dark
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has issued new restrictions on communications by Interior Department employees. Secretarial Order 3431 asks visitors to public lands to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.” Also, no information can be “emphasized” about any natural feature “unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur of said feature.” Letting park visitors know that the Trump administration has defunded recreational uses of public lands while maximizing their use for fossil fuel production would presumably be a violation of both directives.
Advocacy for Public Lands
Since the Administration is doing its best to limit public awareness of its actions by muzzling public employees with rules like Secretarial Order 3431, supporters of national parks and public lands should do whatever they can to promote awareness of what is happening. “National parks cannot properly function at the staffing levels this administration has reduced them to,” says Theresa Pierno, the head of the National Parks Conservation Association. Anyone interested in the future of these public resources should contact their representatives to advocate for policy change. National parks are neither liberal nor conservative – they are loved by all Americans. The sale of public lands was stopped by a bipartisan public outcry. The disinvestment in and destructive exploitation of public lands could be stopped by a similar bipartisan effort.
This blog was included as part of the August 2025 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!