Is the Trump administration going to provide Congress with a specific FY26 budget request, one that details how individual parks such as Mount Rainier should be funded?/Rebecca Latson file

Lack of specificity over how the Interior Department would spend funding President Donald Trump has requested for Fiscal 2026 has raised questions in and outside the National Park Service over whether it was done intentionally so Interior Secretary Doug Burgum would receive a lump sum that he could distribute as he chooses.

While Trump has presented a "skinny" Fiscal 2026 budget request to Congress, his administration has yet to provide a more detailed request that contains specific line items explaining how the money would be spent. For the Park Service this detailed request is known as the Green Book, which contains park by park budget numbers. Trump's skinny budget for Interior included cuts of more than $1 billion for the Park Service. The bulk of those cuts, $900 million, are targeted for the agency's day-to-day operations budget. Within the two sentences of narrative specific to that cut, the president said "there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system."

"If you don’t indicate the proposed [Operation of National Park System] allocations park by park, then when the lump sum arrives, [the Office of Management and Budget, Interior Department, Department of Government Efficiency] get to move the $$ around however they want. It will be how they shutter regions, national directorates, and mothball parks," a senior Park Service manager told the Traveler, requesting anonymity so as not to possibly face retribution. "Congress should pass an appropriations bill that specifically lists each park unit and program."

The lack of detailed information for the current fiscal year led U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, to press Burgum for it when the secretary appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee last week to discuss the current fiscal year and the administration's FY26 request. The Democrat focused specifically on the FY25 budget the administration is trying to get Congress to pass via a massive Continuing Resolution — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — and the administration's government-wide pause on spending to underscore his concerns over a lack of spending details.

"All of these individual programs are going, 'We can't be efficient, we're suspending our design work, we're suspending our contractors, it's all going up in price, all because we don't know if our funds are going to be obliterated,'" said the senator. "It's massively inefficient. What I've heard is your desire to be efficient, but all of these subprograms, all operating inefficently right now because you've got people standing around going, 'We don't know what we're doing because we don't have the money and we don't know if we're ever going to get it.'"

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Burgum replied that it was necessary to pause funding so the administration could explore whether agencies are working efficiently. "There's a lot of questions that would be reasonable to ask because those answers that we'll get from looking at 2025 will help inform what we should put in the budget for '26. What's working, what's not, what's efficient."

"To me it's horrifically inefficient to interrupt all that work, nobody knowing what's happening," replied Merkley. "I have heard that OMB (Office of Management and Budget) has locked this up, preventing you from being able to actually give us a spending plan, is that correct?"

"We're waiting for some of the apportionments from OMB, yes," responded Burgum.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who chairs the appropriations committee, agreed with Merkley about the lack of information, telling Burgum that, "you're stuck with the proposal, we're stuck with not knowing how you're going to implement it, and it goes back to what I've asked for and what the ranking member [Merkley] is suggesting, that we've all got to have more detail to it, and I would agree that you need to be clearly focused on what is happening with FY26, but we cannot ignore where we are with FY25."

The prospect that the Trump administration is somehow scheming to receive a lump sum for FY26 without explaining specifically how it would be spent was boggling to former Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis.

"The concept of Congress just granting one chunk of $$ to DOI for the Secretary to distribute is unprecedented in my time," Jarvis said in an email. "It would be good to get a legal opinion on this, as it is really out of the ordinary and pretty much cuts Congress out of the appropriations decisions. Since almost all individual park unit is line-itemed in the normal Congressional annual appropriation, it would seem odd that they would leave that up to the Secretary. Members, Republican and Democratic, generally take a strong interest in how the park in their district is funded."

John Leshy, the Interior Department's chief lawyer during the Clinton administration, said that "if Congress simply handed Burgum a lump sum for parks without providing any detail as to how it was to be spent, park supporters could argue that’s an unconstitutional, overbroad delegation of legislative authority to the executive, teeing it up for the courts to decide, with results hard to predict."

"I presume members of Congress, including Republicans, will be under considerable pressure not to hand Burgum a blank check regarding parks," Leshy said in an email.

Kristen Brengel at the National Parks Conservation Association said Congress needs to hold the administration to proper budgeting process.

"This a major concern. Congress should be very worried," said Brengel, NPCA's senior vice president for governmental affairs. "Burgum didn’t sound like he cares about the vast majority of the National Park System. The Statue of Liberty, Gettysburg, Lake Mead, San Antonio Missions and hundreds of other beloved parks do not have the moniker 'national park' but the America people love them.

"He should have told Congress that he felt this way during his nomination hearing, especially if he wasn’t prepared to be a good steward of our heritage."