| “The National Park Service (NPS) 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 and managed as State-level parks,” reads a federal memo on the matter. Hear, hear! “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.” Though an official list of sites whose management will be shifted is not yet available, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (whom you may remember from the 2024 Republican presidential primary) says that only the 63 “crown jewel” national parks will remain under NPS control.
To put the lesser-traveled sites into perspective: More than 17 million people visited the Golden Gate National Recreation Area last year. Some 16 million visited the Blue Ridge Parkway. D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial drew about 8.5 million. Nearly 5 million visited Zion National Park. Ditto for Yellowstone. But only about 11,000 visited Knife River and 25,000 visited the Roosevelt birthplace, both mentioned by Burgum as possible locations for which management could be transferred. (All figures found here.)
Others, such as North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore, are popular with visitors (2.7 million) but are also tourism hot spots drawing lots of revenue to the state; management could easily be transferred. Ditto with Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve, which draws 2.2 million annually and is nestled in the Everglades. Couldn’t Florida handle management—and maybe do so better than the federal government? (Interestingly, Big Cypress was originally designated a federal property because Floridians were pissed that the state government was trying to put an airport there that would specifically handle supersonic flight. Since “aeronautical engineers understood that aircraft breaking the sound barrier over populated areas would not be tolerated,” the Dade County Port Authority “purchased 39 square miles of remote swamp land” 48 miles away from the nearest population center on Marco Island. So yes, that would’ve resulted in total destruction of the environment, interesting though it is to imagine an alternate future where Florida pioneered supersonic travel.)
When a site has pretty local historical value—like the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site in Richmond, Virginia, which remembers the life of Walker, born to a slave, who later served as the first African-American woman to be a bank president in the U.S. (6,000 visitors in 2024)—it’s just not clear why taxpayers in San Bernardino and Bremerton and Paducah are funding it. I say this as a Walker appreciator: I went to a high school named after her and always found her story inspiring. But I’m not sure people across the country are drawing the same value from this historic site.
“Regardless whether they’re well visited or not, whether people can view it themselves or watch it on TV, they don’t want to see them dismantled,” Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, told Bloomberg. “These schemes to save a couple of nickels by getting rid of parks—it’s unpopular.” She’s correct that it’s a drop in the bucket, but I’m not sure she’s correct that transferring ownership of lesser-known sites will result in a public outcry. Perusing the list of NPS properties, I didn’t even know some of these—like New York City’s Governors Island, which very few visitors from outside of the city travel to—were under federal control. Governors Island is basically a glorified picnic spot for New Yorkers, and its funding should probably reflect that. (Better yet, what would happen if ownership and management became fully private? Why not go a step further? I would gladly pay an admission fee to Governors Island, since I actually use it.)
New Mexico’s state parks director insisted to Bloomberg that if management were transferred to the state, many of the park units would end up closing. But if there’s no political will within the state to fund these sites, maybe that’s a sign that taxpayers there don’t value them highly enough and that they shouldn’t continue to be publicly operated. If taxpayers within the actual state, who are perhaps most likely to visit, don’t value them highly enough, what makes people thing random taxpayers in Maine or New Hampshire do? And might the closure of certain sites result in, OH I DUNNO, supersonic airports being developed on that land at some point in the future? A girl can dream.
Inertia is a powerful force, especially when it comes to government funding. People unimaginatively believe that what has been funded by taxpayers in the past must be funded by taxpayers in the future for it to continue to exist. I don’t believe that this is true, and I’m interested in what happens when we experiment with restoring federalism.
The Trump administration has been open to slaughtering sacred cows, asking why things are done a certain way and whether that can be changed. This can lead to very bleak outcomes, such as eroding due process. But sometimes the outcome can be benign—and these possible NPS changes, if they happen, would be an example. |
