The Gutting of the National Park Service

Plus: An attack on pro-Israel protesters in Colorado, a conservative wins Poland's presidential elections, and more...

Why should the National Park Service be funding so many sites? And what would happen if some of those properties were transferred to state or tribal management?

The Trump administration is asking those sensible questions, and is proposing to cut $1.2 billion from the agency's budget, "mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management" per Bloomberg. This is a pet issue of mine: It's always been unclear to me why we expect taxpayers across the country to pay for the upkeep and management of so many designated sites, including ones they will never visit and have never heard of. Do you really need to be paying for New York City's Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site? Or North Dakota's Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site?

I say this as a nature and history appreciator. My interest is not in having these places razed; it's in making sure the federal government is careful about where its money goes and what's actually in the national interest.

"The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not 'National Parks,' in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks," reads a federal memo on the matter. Hear, hear! "The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system." Though an official list of sites whose management will be shifted is not yet available, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (whom you may remember from the 2024 Republican presidential primary) says that only the 63 "crown jewel" national parks will remain under NPS control.

To put the lesser-traveled sites into perspective: More than 17 million people visited the Golden Gate National Recreation Area last year. Some 16 million visited the Blue Ridge Parkway. D.C.'s Lincoln Memorial drew about 8.5 million. Nearly 5 million visited Zion National Park. Ditto for Yellowstone. But only about 11,000 visited Knife River and 25,000 visited the Roosevelt birthplace, both mentioned by Burgum as possible locations for which management could be transferred. (All figures found here.)

Others, such as North Carolina's Cape Hatteras National Seashore, are popular with visitors (2.7 million) but are also tourism hot spots drawing lots of revenue to the state; management could easily be transferred. Ditto with Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve, which draws 2.2 million annually and is nestled in the Everglades. Couldn't Florida handle management—and maybe do so better than the federal government? (Interestingly, Big Cypress was originally designated a federal property because Floridians were pissed that the state government was trying to put an airport there that would specifically handle supersonic flight. Since "aeronautical engineers understood that aircraft breaking the sound barrier over populated areas would not be tolerated," the Dade County Port Authority "purchased 39 square miles of remote swamp land" 48 miles away from the nearest population center on Marco Island. So yes, that would've resulted in total destruction of the environment, interesting though it is to imagine an alternate future where Florida pioneered supersonic travel.)

When a site has pretty local historical value—like the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site in Richmond, Virginia, which remembers the life of Walker, born to a slave, who later served as the first African-American woman to be a bank president in the U.S. (6,000 visitors in 2024)—it's just not clear why taxpayers in San Bernardino and Bremerton and Paducah are funding it. I say this as a Walker appreciator: I went to a high school named after her and always found her story inspiring. But I'm not sure people across the country are drawing the same value from this historic site.

"Regardless whether they're well visited or not, whether people can view it themselves or watch it on TV, they don't want to see them dismantled," Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, told Bloomberg. "These schemes to save a couple of nickels by getting rid of parks—it's unpopular." She's correct that it's a drop in the bucket, but I'm not sure she's correct that transferring ownership of lesser-known sites will result in a public outcry. Perusing the list of NPS properties, I didn't even know some of these—like New York City's Governors Island, which very few visitors from outside of the city travel to—were under federal control. Governors Island is basically a glorified picnic spot for New Yorkers, and its funding should probably reflect that. (Better yet, what would happen if ownership and management became fully private? Why not go a step further? I would gladly pay an admission fee to Governors Island, since I actually use it.)

New Mexico's state parks director insisted to Bloomberg that if management were transferred to the state, many of the park units would end up closing. But if there's no political will within the state to fund these sites, maybe that's a sign that taxpayers there don't value them highly enough and that they shouldn't continue to be publicly operated. If taxpayers within the actual state, who are perhaps most likely to visit, don't value them highly enough, what makes people think random taxpayers in Maine or New Hampshire do? And might the closure of certain sites result in, OH I DUNNO, supersonic airports being developed on that land at some point in the future? A girl can dream.

Inertia is a powerful force, especially when it comes to government funding. People unimaginatively believe that what has been funded by taxpayers in the past must be funded by taxpayers in the future for it to continue to exist. I don't believe that this is true, and I'm interested in what happens when we experiment with restoring federalism.

The Trump administration has been open to slaughtering sacred cows, asking why things are done a certain way and whether that can be changed. This can lead to very bleak outcomes, such as eroding due process. But sometimes the outcome can be benign—and these possible NPS changes, if they happen, would be an example.

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Scenes from New York: From now until the primary later this month, there will be a lot of anti-Zohran content in this space. I apologize, I just cannot let a socialist get elected as mayor.

Zohran's base is the educated, upper middle class in gentrified Manhattan & Brooklyn. Actual working class NYers are voting for Cuomo. The "Working Families Party" has become a costume rich people people wear while slumming it as they playact socialism. https://t.co/XIqxFIWyAW pic.twitter.com/cDe9rOjOF8

— daniela (@daniela__127) May 31, 2025

(For what it's worth, I don't think the initial tweet's claim that the Working Families Party is the "official" arm of the DSA is true, though it does throw its weight behind a lot of DSA folks.)

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QUICK HITS

• "A nationalist candidate backed by Donald Trump secured victory in Poland's presidential election, defeating the centrist mayor of Warsaw in a contest that could stymie the government's efforts to shift the nation back into the European Union mainstream," reports Bloomberg. Karol Nawrocki, a conservative historian and former boxer, has ascended. He "led efforts to topple monuments to the Soviet Red Army in Poland, and Russia responded by putting him on a wanted list, according to Polish media reports," reports the Associated Press. He's seen as a patriot with a history of street brawls (?), which he calls "noble" fights. The power of the president is not enormous in Poland—lots of power is vested in the prime minister—but he does have the ability to veto legislation and set foreign policy. The current government is quite divided, so his conservatism will surely have an impact.
• Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the French biochemist and physician who invented the abortion pill mifepristone, died Friday. The two-pill combo of mifepristone and misoprostol induces abortion, first by blocking the uterus from receiving progesterone, then by stimulating contractions.
• A man, suspected to be 45-year-old Mohamed Sabry Soliman (who has been taken into custody), yelled "Free Palestine" and threw Molotov cocktails at a crowd of pro-Israeli protesters in Boulder, Colorado, injuring several.
• Just Asking Questions on Trump's "big, beautiful bill," featuring Reagan-era Office of Management and Budget chief David Stockman.