President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would cut over $1.2 billion dollars from the National Park Service (NPS). That is around a third of the agency’s annual budget, and it includes a direct $900 million cut to NPS operations. The National Park Conservation Association (NPCA) estimates such cuts would require eliminating funding for 350 of the 433 national parks units–a reduction of 75%.
And these NPS funding cuts are not the only ones targeting agencies or programs that support conservation of federal public lands. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and US Forest Service (USFS) are all facing similarly devastating budget cuts that would slash staffing and hamper their abilities to carry out their missions on behalf of the American people.
The American people currently own, benefit from, and profit from America’s public lands. The Trump administration is proposing the theft of that land and all its benefits.
And who are they giving it all to? They propose giving national lands to states, claiming that “there is an urgent need” to “transfer certain properties to State-level management.” They give no reason for the urgency–in 2023 the NPS contributed over $55 billion to the US economy and supported 415,000 jobs in tourism and recreation, meaning that the American people saw a massive return on their $3.6 billion investment in the NPS that year. There is no urgent need to eliminate that lucrative tourism and recreation industry.
And they give no reason to transfer national parks to states, especially as their own budget proposal slashes state funding in many areas, including cutting $303 million in funding for state, local, and tribal conservation programs by claiming they are “plagued by oversight issues, including allegations of impropriety” by state governments.
The budget suggests that “these partners should be encouraged to fund their own community preparedness and risk mitigation activities”–in other words, states are being left on their own to keep public lands safe. In this instance and in others, states are going to be handed more public lands to manage while also having their budgets cut.
This administration is proposing handing over national parks to states while simultaneously accusing those same states of misusing funds. This budget proposal vilifies state governments and state conservation programs, claiming that states and local organizations are not capable of managing public lands properly, while giving them more land to oversee.
These actions are not only illogical, they reveal the true aim of this budget proposal: to cut all funding for conservation of public lands–national, state, and local.
The claim that states can better manage these public lands is a smoke-screen for individual and corporate greed. The leaders of this administration and their corporate supporters want to own public lands, sell public lands, develop public lands, mine public lands, log public lands. They want to profit from land that the American people are already profiting from.
This administration wants to steal American public lands from Americans, and that is exactly what this budget proposal proposes. When states and locals agencies cannot afford to manage the hundreds of federal lands that have been dumped on them, who will be there to offer to buy them? The wealthy elite and corporations who are orchestrating this administration’s take on public lands, that’s who.
The NPS and other federal land management agencies are not without their flaws. Much of the land overseen by these agencies is the ancestral home of indigenous peoples who often have little say in how the land is now managed. And federal land management is at times so disconnected from local communities that locals feel resentful of, detached from, or unwelcome in the federal lands in their own backyards.
There is significant room for improvement in the ways in which America’s public lands are managed. But they should be improved, not eliminated. This budget proposal is the first step toward giving away our national inheritance–some of the greatest jewels in America’s crown–to the greedy elite.
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