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President Donald Trump's proposed 2026 budget would gut the National Park Service, slashing $1.2 billion from the agency's current $4.8 billion budget. $900 million of the cuts would come from NPS operations—a proposal that Theresa Pierno, the president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association called “nothing less than an all-out assault on America's national parks.”
The proposal calls for giving away an undisclosed number of the park service's 433 sites to states, an idea that Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities called “a non-starter.”
“States can’t afford to manage them,” Rokala said, “so the inevitable outcome is the closure, then privatization of our most treasured public lands.”
The rest of the proposed Interior and Agriculture department budgets are similarly bleak. The president called on Congress to rescind national monument designations, and proposed selling national forests in order to “rightsize their real property footprint.”
The budget also calls for eliminating the Forest Service's role in fighting wildfires, instead consolidating all wildfire operations under the Interior department. That would put one of Elon Musk's DOGE operatives, acting Interior Assistant Secretary Tyler Hassen, in charge of all wildfire response across the country.
New nature doc sees the Colorado River as an opportunity, not a crisis
In the latest episode of CWP's podcast, The Landscape, Kate and Aaron dive into the details of the proposed Trump budget, then Kate talks to Len Necefer, CEO and founder of NativesOutdoors, about his new documentary, The American Southwest, and how he's advocating for public lands under the second Trump administration. Listen now or subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
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Even a cursory look at the data shows that NPS cannot keep adding more and more visitors with fewer and fewer employees. The proposed 30% cuts would devastate national parks, while saving a grand total of 
