WASHINGTON – The Trump administration is proposing steep cuts to the National Park Service and plans to cut nearly 3,000 more positions from the payroll.
U.S. senators of both parties told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at a hearing Wednesday that they don’t like the idea.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said the budget and personnel cuts would further degrade the Park Service.
“You're proposing a 38% cut to parks facilities, operation and maintenance — these are the road crews, things like that — a 35% cut for support staff, and over 50% of funding for resource stewardship,” she said. “To me, that is just a recipe for disaster for our parks.”
The Appropriations subcommittee hearing comes after a tumultuous year for the National Park Service. The agency is estimated to have already lost a quarter of its workforce since the start of the second Trump administration. And, according to the president’s 2027 budget request, more tumult lies ahead.
In Alaska, according to the National Parks Conservation Association, the Park Service lost a third of its regional office staff by May of last year. Probationary workers were laid off and then, by court order, reinstated. Early retirement offers enticed others to leave.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she’s concerned about personnel cuts to the Park Service, and to other agencies within Interior, like the Bureau of Land Management. She praised the Interior secretary for the administration’s initiatives to develop energy projects on Alaska’s federal land. But, she said, none of it’s possible without proper staffing.
“We can't manage these unless we have the people there,” she said. “It just takes a lot of good people doing good things to turn it into sustained success.”
While they decried cuts, senators also criticized a big increase in one part of the proposed National Parks budget: $10 billion for presidential beautification projects in Washington, D.C.
Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore, called it a slush fund.
“Vanity projects to promote the current president are better suited to a regime than to a republic,” he said.
Merkley said the fund would be larger than what the president proposes to spend on annual maintenance for National Parks nationwide. He complained that the administration isn’t even telling Congress what projects it intends to take on.
Murkowski sounded skeptical of the D.C. beautification money, too, and lukewarm on a budget increase to support 300 new Park Police officers in Washington, New York and San Francisco.
“It's good to know that we're going to have more law enforcement within the Park Service,” she said. “But I just need to know that I've got people out in the park who are keeping the bears at bay.”
The president’s budget is a request. Congress is supposed to control the purse strings by passing appropriation bills but it has, over several decades, ceded substantial authority to the executive branch.
