The first national park I ever visited was Carlsbad Caverns, and I doubt the Brownie camera I toted did justice to the underground wonder. My dad, a New Yorker who had loved the West ever since Uncle Sam’s army introduced him to it, took us to see all the wonders in driving distance. That’s what they could afford. And there was plenty to see.
I did the same. My active and curious son was smitten with the caverns. He took his own son to Carlsbad when the time came.
We’ve been repeat customers of all 15 national parks and monuments in New Mexico and closely involved with one, El Malpais National Monument and Conservation Area. My husband, as a young federal employee, did the legwork to get this one started and then managed the Bureau of Land Management’s half for years. I know firsthand all the time he and his co-workers put in off the clock. I know how much they cared. And I know how much the towns of Grants and Milan wanted this designation to put them on the tourist map. My first book was about El Malpais.
This year we celebrate 110 years of the National Park Service in the same year that the nation marks its 250th anniversary. We hear lofty words about national heritage, but the reality on the ground is far different.
The national parks are as popular as ever: 320 million people visited last year and spent $29 billion in communities near the parks, which supported 340,000 jobs and generated more than $56 billion in economic activity, wrote Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM.
And yet parks suffer from a $24 billion maintenance backlog – New Mexico’s portion of that is $213 million, Heinrich says – and lost a quarter of their staffing, more than 4,000 jobs, to DOGE and other cuts.
“Instead of working to address these maintenance needs and keep visitors safe and our parks accessible, the administration is making hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars available for the President’s vanity projects,” Heinrich said.
What Heinrich calls “vanity projects,” the president calls “beautification.”
This includes repairing ornamental fountains in Washington D.C. ($60 million); the disastrous, no-bid renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ($16 million); covering horse statues in gold leaf ($5 million); replacing Tennessee flagstone paving the White House’s West Colonnade with polished African granite carved in Italy ($689,232); and replacing stucco on the Colonnade wall so the president could hang plaques with his opinions of U.S. presidents ($347,503).
Who’s paying for all this? The National Park Service, according to multiple media reports, and the price tag keeps rising. The NPS’s tab, says veteran D.C. journalist Scott McFarlane, is upwards of $323 million, some from park entrance fees and some from America the Beautiful Passes. (Trump wanted his picture next to George Washington’s on the pass.)
By law, at least 80% of recreation fees must be used for maintenance at the national park site where the fees were collected. No president has ever tapped park fees to support his own projects.
“That is not how it was designed to work,” said an official with the National Parks Conservation Association. “It shouldn’t just be all at one park at the expense of the entire national park system.”
At our national parks, visitors are seeing long lines, deteriorating roads and water systems, fewer ranger programs and tours, closed bathrooms, shorter hours, less habitat restoration, and less trail maintenance. Some parks, deprived of guardrail replacements and other safety infrastructure, are disasters waiting to happen.
It could get worse. For fiscal 2027 the administration wants to cut NPS discretionary funding for park operations by 32% and reduce an already decimated staff level by 18% to 13,119. Heinrich warned it would gut the scientists, archaeologists, and historians that parks rely on. The administration wants $10 billion for more D.C. beautification projects.
What would your family vote for? Gilded statues or ranger who can answer questions? Fancy pavers or park rangers?
Political science professor Robert Cropf, of St. Louis University, sees the NPS’s gradual decline as a deliberate strategy he calls “governing by neglect.”
“Visible cuts carry political risk,” but underfunding “avoids backlash that would come with openly targeting popular institutions like national parks,” he wrote in The Fulcrum. Fewer rangers and longer lines may only feel like an inconvenience or the cost of popularity. “But it is something else: the visible edge of a deeper shift in how the country governs its shared resources.”
Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.
