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There are serious concerns over how the incoming Trump administration will impact "America's Best Idea."/Rebecca Latson There are serious concerns over how the incoming Trump administration will impact "America's Best Idea."/Rebecca Latson

4th Annual Threatened And Endangered Parks | Trump's Return Triggering Trepidation

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Kurt Repanshek

Published Date

January 15, 2025

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There are serious concerns over how the incoming Trump administration will impact "America's Best Idea."/Rebecca Latson

Analysis

After decades of understaffing and skimpy budgets, the National Park Service likely will face continued struggles under the Trump administration, which is heading to Washington, D.C., hell-bent to cut the size of the federal government.

Scientists and Park Service personnel who worked under the first Trump administration are expressing grave concerns that further fiscal reductions and policy changes could upend the way the agency goes about its mission to conserve the National Park System. Worries over the role of science in the agency and overall scientific integrity are running high, as they are for the health of the environment.

Those who spoke to the Traveler voiced worries that the incoming administration will promulgate dramatic and potentially radical changes that roll back not only environmental protections the Biden administration installed, but years, even decades, of progress on environmental stewardship and parks preservation that could reverse the Park Service's mandate to prioritize conservation of natural resources over recreational use.

Might the incoming Trump administration try to divest the National Park Service of small units that attract few visitors?/Jim Stratton photo of Pipe Spring National Monument

Might the incoming Trump administration try to divest the National Park Service of small units that attract relatively few visitors?/Jim Stratton photo of Pipe Spring National Monument

"I would say, based on the damage they inflicted the last time, the incoming administration threatens the ecological integrity of national parks and the scientific integrity of the National Park Service," said Dr. Patrick Gonzalez, who worked for the Park Service as a climate change scientist during the first Trump administration and moved into the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for the Biden administration.

Gonzalez, now a climate change scientist and forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the few who agreed to speak on the record in discussing the prospects of change upcoming. 

Worries extend to potential weakening of the powerful Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), with impacts that could limit the NPS's ability to protect natural resources it is responsible for protecting from internal and external threats. In addition, there's worry that the new administration could impose operational changes both for units of the park system that draw few visitors and those so burdened with crowding that the agency has instituted timed-entry permits or capacity limits.

At the National Parks Conservation Association, President and CEO Theresa Pierno said her organization would work hard to protect the Park Service and the park system.

“During the last Trump administration, we saw attempts to weaken or dismantle the agencies that protect parks and public lands,” she said shortly after the November election. “We saw attempts to undo environmental protections that had stood for decades. Thanks to our community of park supporters, we were able to stop many of those attacks — and we’re prepared to defend our parks again.” 

There is, however, optimism in some corners that Trump will support renewal of the Great American Outdoors Act to continue Park Service work on backlogged maintenance projects and will be open to fee strategies that could generate more funding for the parks. That initiative, which the Republican signed into law and which is providing the Park Service with $6.5 billion for the work, expires in September.

"The first Trump administration placed a lot of emphasis on national park maintenance issues, ultimately resulting in the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act that provided historic funding for deferred maintenance in parks and other public land agencies," pointed out Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the free market-driven Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. "With the GAOA’s Legacy Restoration Fund set to expire in 2025, a second administration would have a key opportunity to extend or improve upon this program. This could help address the persistent and growing maintenance backlogs, ensuring our parks are better equipped to handle record-breaking visitation levels.

"There are also opportunities to update and modernize park fee structures, especially in light of record visitation levels," he added in an email. "By allowing parks to better capture revenue from their increasing popularity, the Park Service could enhance its ability to fund both maintenance and visitor services. This would also help complement investments from GAOA's Legacy Restoration Fund."

Organized Chaos

Institutional knowledge and organizational structure and stability are key for the Park Service, whose workforce swells to 20,000 in summer. But during Trump's first term, chaos reigned under a stream of acting NPS directors — and never a permanently appointed one — while Park Service senior leadership was shuffled, apparently to encourage retirements. 

Dan Wenk, whose Park Service career found him in high-ranking positions as diverse as deputy Park Service director, acting director of the National Park Foundation, and Yellowstone National Park superintendent, retired nine months before his planned retirement rather than uproot from the West to accept a cross-country transfer to oversee the National Capital Region. Following in Wenk's footsteps was Sue Masica, Intermountain Regional director in Denver since 2013, who retired rather than accept a directed re-assignment to the Midwest regional director position in Omaha, Nebraska.

Bert Frost, who had been Alaska Regional director since 2014, initially was told in 2018 to head to Lake Mead National Recreation Area to serve as superintendent, but remained in Alaska until July 2019 when he was shifted to the Midwest Regional Office.

Cam Sholly, was reassigned from being director of the Midwest Region to succeed Wenk in Yellowstone, while Lake Mead Superintendent Lizette Richardson, who was told to take over as regional director for the Intermountain Region, retired. 

Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk/NPS, Jacob W. Frank

Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk was forced into retirement by the first Trump administration/NPS, Jacob W. Frank

One recently retired Park Service manager anticipates a likely revival of a Trump executive order (discarded by President Biden) to strip protections from civil service workers perceived as disloyal. As well, this person said, "it is very likely that they will shuffle the SES [Senior Executive Service] people, just as they did in Trump 1, if nothing else than to destabilize the leadership of the organization.

“Even if you keep the same people, it's still destabilizing things, because you don't have consistent leadership anywhere. And then past records suggest, whether it's intentional or not, they will suggest to SES people that they move to places that they may not want to move to" and that could lead to more retirements, added this manager who asked not to be identified so they could speak candidly.

Something to watch for, another former manager said, is whether the incoming administration fills top-level positions with experienced Park Service veterans or individuals from outside the agency. "That will be telling on how they approach park management," said the individual, who asked not to be identified for professional reasons.

Potential efforts to reduce the overall federal workforce could mean selective cuts to Park Service initiatives, said Elaine Leslie, who was chief of biological resources for the Park Service when she retired in 2019. Personnel who work on climate change issues might seek to change their titles if they mention climate change, she said.

Scientific Integrity

Scientific integrity suffered greatly during the first Trump administration. Among the casualties was Director's Order 100, which Jon Jarvis, NPS director during the Obama administration, crafted to clarify and reaffirm the Park Service's “predominant” duty to protect natural and cultural resources, which federal courts have upheld. 

The order, signed December 20, 2016, told park managers that three criteria — best available science, adherence to the law, and long-term public interest — were to drive a bureau-wide shift toward interdisciplinary collaboration, increased scientific literacy, and more training. None of that was actually a change in direction, but it unequivocally spelled out in one place the expectations for decision making by superintendents.

Then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, appointed by Trump, had acting-Park Service Director Michael Reynolds rescind the order in August 2017. 

Portions of a house that collapsed overnight at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in Rodanthe/NPS

Will the National Park Service lose funding to prepare parks for climate-change impacts?/

Gonzalez worries that scientists will be muzzled.

"Based on the last time, the incoming administration threatens the scientific integrity of National Park Service and other federal agencies," he said during a phone call. "They denied fundamental science on public health, the environment, and climate change."

Many worry especially about climate change programs and information. Even the words “climate change” were removed from documents during the first Trump term.

Despite published science affirming global warming causation from vehicle emissions and other human sources, the first Trump administration "denied these scientific facts," said the scientist. "They used intimidation that caused some National Park Service employees to self-censor."

"When those middle managers attempted to suppress my work and communications on climate change I refused and stood strongly for scientific integrity because those attempts to suppress the communications on the human cause of climate change run against Department of Interior policy, the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment," said Gonzalez. It's important for the agency to educate people on the importance of protecting the parks by cutting carbon pollution, he added.

Another NPS veteran told the Traveler that "[C]limate policy will be most likely changed or adjusted a lot, I fear. I think science will be heavily monitored and messaging controlled, which is against science integrity principles."

National Park Service saw crews spent weeks clearing trees downed on the Blue Ridge Parkway by Hurricane Helene/NPS

A warming climate was pointed to for the powerful Hurricane Helene that devastated southern stretches of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian National Scenic Trail/NPS

Professor Robert Keiter, a law professor who heads the Wallace Stegner Center at the University of Utah and has focused much of his career on observing the National Park Service and other federal land-management agencies, thinks that "based upon the last [Trump] administration, the role of science is unlikely to be in the forefront of the Trump administration. And in terms of climate science, that will probably get short shrift in the second Trump administration."

Environmental Upheaval

Protection of wildlife and other natural resources also stand to be on the front line of political change under the incoming administration, according to those Traveler talked with.

Under Trump's first term, the Park Service was forced to relinquish to states some of its authority over wildlife management, and efforts were made to water down the ESA.

Keiter fully expects the second Trump administration "to make another run" at weakening the ESA, the nation's landmark wildlife preservation law.

Decisions made by the Biden administration under the ESA "are certainly at risk," he said. "And that includes another likely run at revision of regulations under that law. ... The regulations have been pretty stable over that period of time, until the last Trump administration. They sought to make some pretty major changes, most of which the Biden administration has reversed, but in all likelihood the Trump administration will reverse those again and probably try to install basic revisions, including things like limitations on critical habitat designations."

Individual species that could be in the crosshairs include grizzly bears and gray wolves, and already U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, has introduced legislation to delist Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bears as a threatened species. Just last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the grizzlies would remain listed under the ESA.

Biden administration efforts to recover grizzlies in the North Cascades Ecosystem could be scuttled, while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could push back against a lawsuit for failing to provide ESA protections for gray wolves in the Lower 48. 

Leslie fears the next administration will be willing to give “states more authority to do whatever they want with predators. ... The American people ... spent a lot of money on the restoration of species, and I think that's just going to be at risk in a big way.”

During Trump’s first administration the Migratory Bird Treaty Act also was weakened. One change was to not penalize businesses or individuals for "[I]ncidental" takings, such as the deaths of migratory birds that land on an uncovered pond of hazardous wastes.

While a federal judge blocked that, there are concerns the act could be targeted again.

“It wasn't completely gutted, but amended to be far less effective, and it took a lot of steps to try to reenact some of that over the last four years,” said Leslie. “But I don't think anything got back to where it really needed to be, so I worry about the continuation of that.”

Along with targeting the ESA, which Trump did during his first term by reducing the amount of habitat that could be protected for threatened and endangered species and allowing for economic considerations in ESA determinations, there are concerns the incoming administration could weaken NEPA. Congress passed the landmark law in 1969 with a mandate that agencies review potential environmental impacts of their decisions.

Project 2025, a blueprint for a Republican presidential administration written in part by officials from the first Trump administration, calls for reforming NEPA by reviving prior Trump administration orders such as limiting the size of NEPA reports and highlighting "the costs of the document itself.” Congress should also consider “eliminating judicial review of the adequacy of NEPA documents or the rectitude of NEPA decisions," Project 2025 states.

Some of that streamlining can be useful, according to the retired superintendent who spoke to the Traveler.

"Some of that wasn't bad, but you know, experience makes me skeptical, so who knows what else they will do," they said.

The ESA status of grizzly bears could change/NPS file

There also are concerns over Trump's pledge to increase oil and natural gas production, which are already at record levels under Biden.

"They favor oil drilling and methane extraction, which pollute air and water and destroy habitat," said Gonzalez. "In the long-term, they favor increasing the burning of oil, methane and coal, the primary cause of climate change, which published research shows has damaged ecosystems in national parks and other federal lands.

Monumental Changes?

During his first term, Trump in 2017 reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, both in Utah, by about 1 million areas. While Biden reversed that move, would it be outlandish to think the incoming president will again shrink those two monuments and perhaps go for others?

Still pending is a federal lawsuit by conservationists contending that presidents lacked authority to reduce the size of monuments. And the Antiquities Act, which authorizes presidents to establish new national monuments on federal lands, is likely to be a target of the administration and the GOP-led Congress.

While a lawsuit the state of Utah attacking Biden’s restoration of the original boundaries to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments was dismissed in August 2023, the state “appealed that case to the 10th Circuit, which held oral argument [this] fall but has not yet issued a decision,” said Heidi McIntosh, the managing attorney for the Denver office of Earthjustice.

“It was clear from the plaintiff’s arguments that they’re hoping to get the cases to the U.S. Supreme Court quickly and attack the monument designations themselves and perhaps the Antiquities Act itself,” she said. 

How much land is needed to protect geologic oddities in the Grand Staircase?/BLM

Might the second Trump administration try again to shrink the Grand Staircase-Escalante (pictured) and Bears Ears national monuments in Utah?/BLM

Something else to watch for, the Traveler was told, is whether the next administration funds or supports national monuments designated by Biden and, more seriously, seeks to downsize smaller parks, letting concessionaires run more operations in the parks, or, something Congress would have a say in, privatizing units, all in the name of cutting costs for the federal government.

There are fears the second Trump administration will halt spending through the Inflation Reduction Act that has helped the Park Service build climate change resiliency into some of its parks. 

Something else to watch out for is whether the next administration tries to rewrite the Park Service's Management Policies that serve as a guidebook for park superintendents on how best to manage the parks.

Rewriting the Management Policies with an emphasis on recreation over conservation could be coupled with giving concessionaires more authority in the parks.

"If they put in people who understand how the system works they can work a lot faster, and I would fully expect that they will make a major change in the Management Policies," said the retired Park Service employee. The Management Policies, they added, are very specific in stating that, "when in doubt, conservation is predominant over visitor enjoyment."

Against that backdrop, "America's Best Idea" could be in for some rough times.

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