Trump funding cuts halt repairs, critical work at national parks

What’s political, they ask, about funding the care of some 30 sled dogs in Denali National Park?

“I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why,” said Aaron Weiss, executive director for the Center for Western Priorities.

About $90,000 was earmarked for hiring three youth interns to work in the historic Denali kennels, assisting with dog training and winter patrol preparation in the Alaskan backcountry. With this program now on hold, park staff worry that the new crop of puppies can’t be trained, potentially leading to the collapse of the 100-year program.

The projects had already secured funds from congressional appropriations and were set to begin Oct. 1. From invasive plant removal to resource inventorying to environmental surveys, they were unglamorous tasks crucial for keeping the parks running.

The paused funding comes at a time when the country’s national parks are straining under other cuts from the Department of the Interior. Staffing levels have shrunk after last year’s mass firings, and other avenues for park maintenance have been stalled.

Outdoor groups and park enthusiasts are worried that this latest squeeze still isn’t the end to the cuts. As individual parks struggle to stay afloat, the advocates fret that the national parks system is marching toward a bigger crisis — potentially an existential one.

A new status: 'Disapproved'

Partnerships are a common way for the National Park Service to manage its parks. Such an arrangement splits the massive burden of running a park between the federal government and state, tribal or private partners, encouraging a sense of joint citizen responsibility.

Even with this outsourcing, partnerships can bring cost savings to the agency. That’s because nonprofit partners are good at rallying their own funding to supplement partnership agreements, said Matthew Nelson, executive director of the Arizona Trail Association. Through their own fundraising, they often double or triple the federal award and coordinate volunteers to assist in carrying out those projects.

In this latest round of disruptions at the park service, $25.9 million in partnership agreements was axed. The official term is “disapproved” — a newly coined designation that no one working on the projects fully understands.

That also means no one knows what will happen now, whether the projects are canceled for good, are under review or if there is a chance funding might ever resume.

“The disapproval of these cooperative agreements is a huge loss for a lot of our national parks,” said Chance Wilcox, an associate director at the National Parks Conservation Association. “The Department of the Interior saying that it's due to a misalignment of values is absurd to me and really concerning.”

At the time of the paused funding, the Interior Department quietly appointed Kristen Eastlick, a former leader of a right-wing research organization with no experience in public lands management, to spearhead the agency’s grants and partnerships function.

Even if Interior reverses this decision, it might come too late. Projects can take months to years to plan so they are ready to go when the fiscal cycle starts on Oct. 1. Delays can shut down a project for a whole year if workers miss field season or windows of balmy weather, Nelson said.

Despite follow-up questioning from partnership groups, the Interior Department hasn’t elaborated further on why the projects were disapproved. As far as outdoor groups can tell, there is no rhyme or reason for the blanket decision.

In a barebones statement, the agency told The Arizona Republic that it is “ensuring that taxpayer dollars are being used to make life more affordable for Americans and expand access to our public lands. The Department will continue to prioritize funds that best serve the American people and keep our parks safe, affordable, and open.”

It didn’t respond to repeated questions from The Republic about how these stalled projects ran afoul of the Trump administration’s priorities and whether it would restart funding.

Cuts to invasive control, wildfire restoration, species care

A map by the Center for Western Priorities shows the extent of the interruptions across park units nationwide.

Some projects in limbo include invasive fish removal at Glen Canyon in Arizona and fulfilling procedural requirements for constructing and repairing infrastructure in Death Valley National Park. One partnership involved native seed collection and planting to restore burn scars in Joshua Tree National Park. Another would have allowed for the survey, monitoring and care of endangered desert tortoises in Mojave National Preserve, California.

The Southwest’s park units have also been impacted by these cuts. Many of the projects were designed to help shore up the resilience of wild spaces and natural resources against climate change.

As Lake Powell’s water levels recede due to ongoing drought, a now-halted $800,000 award would have funded archaeological surveys of 3,000 acres of newly exposed shoreline.

Before the holds, two interns were slated to work at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona on native plant care and landscape restoration. The park is already undergoing significant ecological upheaval from construction activity of the border wall, which will likely encourage the infiltration of non-native species.

“This partner work was going to be really important to add some capacity,” said Lilly Bock-Brownstein, creative content and policy manager at the Center for Western Priorities. “Now that work simply is not going to get done.”

One of the partner groups hit the hardest is the Great Basin Institute, a Nevada-based field studies organization operating throughout the West. As a result of the funding pause, it lost 78 projects and nearly $13 million in financing.

The institute has appealed to the federal government for clarification on the reason for the project pauses. The institute declined to speak with The Republic about the current status and whether it will litigate.

Right now, it’s unclear where the $26 million for partnerships will go.

Critics point out that a separate $60 million in national park entrance fees, which normally fund facility improvements, have already been rerouted to construction projects in Washington, DC, at the behest of President Donald Trump to “beautify” the capital. Another $7 million was clawed from the same pot of money for renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The structure currently sits empty after the overhaul led to algal blooms and peeling paint.

Essentially, dissenters are worried that the $26 million will be channeled toward other political endeavors without congressional approval.

Visitors might not notice the impacts on parks and preserves right away, Wilcox said. Most public-facing positions in parks are filled, and the department leadership has pledged to boost hiring of seasonal workers, though the pace has fallen short of hiring targets.

But the long-term health of public lands might take a catastrophic hit, and the damage might be more expensive to fix than doing routine preventative maintenance in the first place. Many of the disapproved projects were for behind-the-scenes work that might not come into their full importance until much later, experts say, such as immediately after a wildfire.

Park funds diverted to DC projects

This round of cuts to the National Park Service lands on top of a flurry of other austerity measures over the past two years. The agency is still reeling from last year's staff cuts, during which thousands of federal workers were fired across various agencies and departments. Since then, the park service workforce has shrunk by 25%, leaving local offices understaffed.

The employees who have hung on after the rounds of firings and deferred resignation offers are purportedly suffering from low morale and overwork.

Earlier this year, Washington officials downgraded 1,492 approved projects, worth a combined $400 million, to low-priority status in more than 200 national park sites. Meanwhile, other infrastructure renovations at the capital, including the reflecting pool project, catapulted ahead of the funding queue.

These thousands of delayed projects would have addressed the park service’s maintenance backlog. Now, projects from repairing fire suppression systems in Death Valley to purchasing toilet paper for bathrooms at Yellowstone are falling by the wayside.

In Arizona, one of the deprioritized projects was stabilizing the scorched Grand Canyon Lodge and cabins in the North Rim after last year’s Dragon Bravo fire.

What “low priority” means is anyone’s guess, but environmental advocates are not optimistic.

“They’re effectively dead,” Weiss said.

Experts like Weiss and Nelson think that the administration’s endgame is to sell off public lands, after starving them of resources they need for managing them so that they fail by design. 

The string of attacks on national parks echoes other government actions to public lands managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Recently, the Trump administration moved to roll back the roadless rule and opened up 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal leasing. 

Real-estate developers are sensing new opportunities. A longtime political donor of the Trump administration has now proposed a land exchange that would allow his company to build a private access road into Yosemite. The same request was struck down during the Bush and Obama administrations.

Major League Baseball officials have also approached the Trump administration with suggestions to build a baseball park inside Grand Teton National Park for stand-alone games.

Public land advocates suggest that concerned members of the public contact their congressional representatives to voice objections and demand more funding for national parks. Otherwise, they say, there is no telling what the federal government might do next to the 433 national parks units, and whether some of the policy decisions will ever be reversed or accounted for.

“All the rules have changed,” Nelson of the trail association said.