Ninety-five percent of Biscayne National Park is underwater/NPS file

More than 90 percent of Biscayne National Park is underwater, so no one would miss it if it was dropped from the National Park System, right? You might say the same for Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout national seashores, which are located on barrier islands that sea-level rise eventually is going to submerge, so why should they remain in the system?

Bering Land Bridge National Preserve attracted fewer than 3,000 visitors last year, so why is the National Park Service paying staff to keep it open? Close it!

That just might be the thinking of President Donald Trump, whose fiscal 2026 budget proposal calls for a $900 million cut to the Park Service's operations budget, a slash that the National Parks Conservation Association says would require about 350 parks to lose all of their funding.

"The president’s proposed budget plan is beyond extreme. It is catastrophic. Every action taken so far by this administration has chipped away at national parks and their staff, but this budget is the final blow. If enacted by Congress, our National Park System would be completely decimated," said Theresa Pierno, who leads NPCA.

Trump just might be signaling that that's his intent. Indeed, his budget proposal, which overall calls for more than $1 billion in cuts to the Park Service, suggested that some park units be pushed off to state management.

"The National Park Service responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not 'National Parks,' in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized as State-level parks," his budget narrative reads. "The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but 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."

A question yet to be answered is whether Trump views only the 63 units that carry "national park" in their formal names as worthy of being held within the system? Of course, at this point it's only an academic debate between those searching for any means of paring down the federal budget and those who see value in all 433 units of the park system.

“The numbers speak for themselves. Proposed cuts of this magnitude could shutter at least 350 national parks sites across the country, effectively more than 75 percent of our park system," Pierno said. "This proposal is an all-out assault on America’s national parks. Our national parks aren’t just places on a map. They’re our shared legacy, safeguarding the beauty, history and culture of our country. For over a century, Americans have loved and protected our national parks, battlefields, historic sites, recreation areas and so much more. We can’t be the generation that lets an administration’s reckless agenda unravel this great legacy."

The late U.S. Rep. Jim Hansen, a Republican from Utah who chaired the House Natural Resources Committee, in 1995 was accused of saying that Great Basin National Park in Nevada could be lopped from the park system, explaining that if you visited it once, there was no need to return. Hansen later claimed it was faulty attribution, that one of his constitutents had told him that.

Last year 152,068 visited Great Basin, so maybe it's on Trump's perceived list, too.

Pierno doesn't think any park should be on such a list, and that Congress needs to make its position known.

“Silence is complicity. Congress must get off the sidelines and act now. Every member of Congress must stand up and reject this reckless proposal," she said.

The National Park Service receives less than 1-15th of 1 percent of the federal budget, according to park advocates.