If you visited one of the fee-for-entry U.S. national parks this past Monday expecting to have the fee waived—as it had been since 2011 to mark Martin Luther King’s birthday, you may have been surprised that the fee had been reinstated. The same will be true for Juneteenth, which had been a free day since 2021. This year, both of those fee-holidays have been discontinued. A new one, Flag Day-slash-President Trump’s Birthday, has been established. And if you don’t happen to be an American citizen, the fee for entry contains an $80 surcharge for visits, or, for the annual pass $250 more than the “residents” annual visitors pass which, this year, is emblazoned with the image of President Trump’s face.
Of course, you might have also paid nothing to get in: Through Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) layoffs, as well as buyouts and retirements, the park service has seen a 25 percent drop in permanent staff in the year since Trump took office again, leaving a number of park gates, at which entrance fees might be collected and park rules reviewed, unattended. Between that and fewer staff on hand to monitor behavior, park visitors have been going slightly wild in the wild, unleashing their dogs (and perhaps their ids), climbing and jumping off of mountains, strewing litter, and flying drones.
Two recent dispatches from Yosemite National Park—one from October of last year that appeared in Outside magazine and another from this week from the New York Times—paint a picture of disarray and disinvestment in Yosemite, which enjoys status as the OG national park for being the first time land was set aside specifically for preservation and public use by the U.S. government–which happened during the Lincoln administration.
The 1916 Organic Act states the National Park Service has a dual mandate: “to preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” Congress passed legislation in 1978 clarifying that, when those goals of enjoyment and preservation are in conflict, the park service should prioritize preservation.
The current Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, sees the park and public lands in different terms—mostly financial. “Interior-managed resources hold a significant position on America’s Balance Sheet,” he said in a May 2025 statement to a congressional subcommittee (during which he also referred to parks with low attendance as “cost centers,” liabilities he’d like to turn over to states). But ultimately, this administration prioritizes enjoyment over preservation—in pointed contrast to the Biden administration, if not the 1916 Organic Act. Trump’s July 2025 executive order “Making America Beautiful Again by Improving Our National Parks” states the interior secretary “shall review all of the Department’s recreational access rules and take steps to rescind any that unnecessarily restrict recreation in national parks. In conducting this review, the Secretary of the Interior shall especially scrutinize all recreational access rules or other restrictions promulgated or enacted during the prior administration.”
When budget cuts came for park staff, buyouts and retirement incentives picked off those with longer years of service. With them went experience and institutional knowledge. In May of last year, staff members of a division of the NPS called Inventory & Monitoring (I&M), which tracks what they call the key indicators—“vital signs”—of a park’s ecosystem, were told they might be part of a Reduction in Force (RIF)—laid off. Outside’s writer reported that, in addition to worries about losing their jobs, an employee told her “I&M staff were acutely concerned about losing decades of data they’d gathered in the parks…. The group spent the next week feverishly uploading data and scientific protocols to an online repository and transferring access to park staff whose jobs seemed more secure.” While a judge blocked the RIF, the I&M eventually shed 80 of its 300 or so staffers.
Their efforts recall the frantic attempts, following cuts announced by DOGE, to rescue datasets at the National Institutes of Health, the loss of which, in both cases, may prove to be devastating.
“Over the next three years or so, unless Congress steps in, the Park Service will be pretty seriously damaged, you might almost say dismantled,” former NPS director Jonathan Jarvis, told Outside.
The administration that Trump is even more at odds with than the prior one is that of Theodore Roosevelt, who doubled the number of sites within the National Park system and established five new national parks during his administration.
In 1903, the same year he camped out with John Muir for three nights in Yosemite, he spoke at the laying of the cornerstone of the gateway to another national park, Yellowstone.
“[A]lready its beauties can be seen with great comfort in a short space of time and at an astoundingly small cost, and with the sense on the part of every visitor that it is in part his property, that it is the property of Uncle Sam and therefore of all of us,” he said. “The only way that the people as a whole can secure to themselves and their children the enjoyment in perpetuity of what the Yellowstone Park has to give is by assuming the ownership in the name of the nation and by jealously safeguarding and preserving the scenery, the forests, and the wild creatures.”
Jeff Hagan
Communications Director