Wes Siler’s Newsletter – “Testifying in front of the House of Representatives on Monday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum revealed that the maintenance backlog in national parks now totals over $35 billion. This is the first time we’ve gotten an estimate on the increase to the backlog caused by the Trump administration’s first year in office. The backlog stood at around $23 billion at the end of FY2024. Republicans have been forcing a fail-by-design plan onto the park service for decades. That agency manages 85 million acres of our nation’s most valuable, visited, and fragile public lands, and our most important historic sites, yet the administration’s budget for FY2027 proposes slashing over $1 billion from its already inadequate $3.3 billion annual budget. To put that budget in perspective, the entirety of the National Park Service uses in an entire year the equivalent of about a day-and-a-half of what the war in Iran costs taxpayers. How has the administration managed to add $12 billion to the backlog in just a single year? Four main reasons:

1. Efforts to address the backlog were already underfunded. Even before Trump and his stooges entered office, the backlog was already expanding faster than supposed efforts to address it were able to mitigate.
2. NPS lost around 4,000 staff, or 24 percent of its full-time workforce, to DOGE RIFs and other cuts last year. Much of the maintenance in national parks is performed during summer months by seasonal hires, and efforts to staff up those operations last year were also sabotaged by the administration.
3. Leaving national parks open but understaffed during government shutdowns results in massive amounts of damage. The problem is so bad that officials from both Trump administrations have attempted to cover up the totals. At 43 days, last year’s shutdown was the longest ever.
4. Visitation is booming. At 332 million visitors, 2024 set the all-time record, and last year was a close second. More people equals more wear and tear, but the administration is responding by reducing rather than increasing maintenance budgets…”