The Trump administration has announced plans to terminate the National Park Service leases of at least 34 buildings that function as visitor centers, law enforcement offices, museums, archives, and centers for necessary park services.
“Parks are being dismantled before our very eyes,” said the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) in an urgent statement released Thursday, March 6.
The NPCA, a politically independent citizens’ group that was formed over a century ago to defend and affirm the shared public lands of the United States, did not mince words. “The situation has become dire,” according to the statement.
“Steps are being taken to remove barriers to drilling and mining on public lands, with even national monuments on the table,” the NPCA warned. “Park staffing is being cut drastically. We’re seeing LGBTQ contributions to America’s history being erased. Plans have been announced to shutter visitor centers, museums and other important facilities through lease terminations.”
The NPCA’s statement warned that rather than fostering efficiency, as the Trump administration has claimed, the organizational liquidation is actually making our shared heritage inaccessible by forcing some visitor centers to limit opening hours and threatening repositories for millions of artifacts of national heritage.
Whole sections of U.S. national parks are now being closed because newly slashed staff can no longer keep up, the NPCA says.
Experts say Trump’s cuts aren’t improving anything
Because of the speed of the White House cuts and the near-total lack of transparency about the actions, it remains difficult to determine precisely the full impact on vacationers.
But already, future travel plans are being destroyed. At California’s Yosemite National Park, one of the jewels of the American public lands system, administrators have been unable to implement the park’s annual entrance reservation system, which helps manage overcrowding. As a result, bookings at area campsites and hotels have dropped dramatically, threatening the livelihoods of the people who work in tourism there.
“This is honestly terrifying,” Elisabeth Barton, a tour operator near the park, told SFGate. “We’re deeply concerned about the long-term health of Yosemite National Park under the current administration.”
“The effects of not having a reservation system are going to be a serious disaster for the visitor experience and the natural environment,” former Yosemite Superintendent Don Neubacher told Afar. “During peak times during the summer, wait lines at the entrance stations will be miles long and many hours long. The transportation system without the reservation system cannot function properly and will be overloaded.”
Some national parks that require reservations, such as Arches in Utah, have been able to open booking systems for at least part of the summer of 2025.
At least 34 NPS leases slated for cancellation
The NPCA has assembled a list of 34 leases that the White House is unilaterally terminating, without having first obtained Congressional approval and without consulting the experts who oversee local operations of the affected parks.
The entire list can be downloaded from the NPCA’s website via this PDF download. Among the abruptly discontinued leases:
- The Southeast Archaeological Center, located on Florida State University property. The NPCA says the facility “provides a centralized location for the storage of archaeological items of national significance. Facilities such as these must be meticulously climate controlled and staffed by experts to protect these irreplaceable resources, which cannot be easily moved without the threat of irreparable damage.” The archaeological center’s own website says its building manages more than 8 million precious artifacts from American history and pre-history, facilitating “the long-term production of archeological resources, compiling, utilizing, and disseminating the archeological information obtained from them.”
- The National Park Service’s Fairbanks Alaska Public Lands Information Center, which the NPCA says was funded with Congressional appropriations. “The public can obtain entrance and other public use permits” at the facility, the NPCA explains, and “rangers here provide education for safe public lands use.”
- The law enforcement office for the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park (pictured above) in Texas. “This facility houses numerous NPS employees who manage the park including first response and other public safety functions, maintenance, IT, equipment storage, and artifacts,” per the NPCA.
- The Little River Canyon Center (pictured below), operated since 2009 alongside Jacksonville State University to serve Little River Canyon National Preserve in Alabama. According to the NPCA, the facility “features a Grand Hall, HD movie theater, gift shop, natural history library, exhibits, classrooms, back deck, outdoor amphitheater, and trails for both education and adventure. It is available to rent for meetings, social gatherings, corporate retreats and other special events.”
- The National Parks Service’s Southern Arizona Office, which supports “southern Arizona’s parks, monuments, and memorials.” The NPCA says, “this centralized office is a cost-effective means of supporting leadership and administrative functions for many smaller parks, precluding the need and extra cost of proving such services at each of the sites.”
- The office for the offshore Channel Islands National Park in Southern California. The conservation group asserts that the office’s location “is important for maintenance and/or public safety (i.e. EMT/dispatch/first response). … There are no other park buildings that can provide the area with ventilation and safety equipment to support these essential activities.”
The NPCA lists 28 more doomed resources that carry out similar functions.
We know that the White House keeps claiming that its federal cuts are about reducing alleged waste, but the NPCA’s list contains many instances of locations that the group insists actually save taxpayers money by carrying out multiple specialized duties under a single roof.
In truth, the administration’s list of reductions seems intended, in part, to target the preservation of millions of precious artifacts from American history as well as to target the sharing of information with taxpayers about their own shared public lands.
Looking at this list, the true nature of the cuts doesn’t seem to be about waste at all, but about erasure.
Here are lists of more public resources under threat
The NPCA has also compiled a list of nature preserves and parks that the Trump administration has targeted for oil, gas, and mineral extraction. You can download that list as a PDF here.
The conservation group’s rundown of public recreational lands now being scoured by Republican lawmakers for extraction potential include Wyoming’s Devils Tower National Monument, which was established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 as the country’s first national monument; Aztec Ruins National Monument in New Mexico, home of delicate ruins dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries; and Grand Canyon–Parashant National Monument, a watershed for the Grand Canyon itself.
In California, tribal and local leaders are planning an emergency trip to Washington to plead against oil exploration at Chuckwalla, which they only managed to designate as a National Monument in January after decades of lobbying.
As if all that wasn’t enough to turn a peaceful John Muir into a vengeful John Brown, the U.S. Congress is also preparing to pass legislation that will open millions of acres of federal land to logging without scientific review, without consideration of endangered animal habitats, and without community input. Additionally, the measure will weaken citizens’ ability to challenge timber exploitation of public lands in court.
Congress has given the bill an Orwellian name, calling it the “Fix Our Forests Act.” Outside of Capitol Hill, though, the legislation has been dubbed the “F*ck Our Forests Act.”
The pending bill, which politicians have wrapped in a more palatable public message about mitigating California wildfires, is gathering steam for passage soon.
Tourists are being affected by cuts made outside the National Park Service, too. Wired has assembled this map and searchable list of all the General Services Administration properties that the Trump administration has said it intends to sell off to the highest bidder.
Those abruptly threatened federal properties include: the Montgomery Bus Station, a pivotal historic landmark where the Freedom Riders advanced the Civil Rights Movement in 1960s Alabama; the Oklahoma City Federal Building, which replaced the building that anti-federalist terrorist Timothy McVeigh targeted in 1995, killing 168; and a plant that provides heating and chilled water to museums and national monuments in Washington, D.C.