Summer is here. The roads are clogging up. And the national parks are burning down around us. Not with fire, with bureaucracy.
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025. The National Park Service has bled out. Staff vanished. Historic signs came down. The budget for keeping these places alive took a knife to the shoulder.
He isn’t done yet.
The 2027 proposal slashes another twenty-five percent. Gone. Just like that. But the President wants you to drive there anyway. Celebrate the Bicentennial. Stare at his face stamped on the new park pass. He’s copying Sean Duffy. The transportation secretary turned reality star with The Great American Road Trip. Go see America, Duffy says. Drive the country.
But the country isn’t ready to welcome you.
Stephanie Pearson knows what’s happening. She’s written for Outside Magazine for years. Authored two books. Talked to Sean Rameswaram on Today, Explained podcast about the cuts.
She’s scared. Not about the trash on the trails, she says. The stuff you can see is just the beginning. It’s the invisible decay.
The Hollowed Workforce
A quarter of full-time staff is gone. More than 4,00 jobs, wiped clean.
What does that look like?
You walk into Yosemite. You still get a greeting. The kiosk clerk is there. They haven’t fired the friendly faces first. That would be too obvious.
They fired the brains.
Biologists. Ecologists. The people who study why the elk are sick or why the rivers run brown. They’re gone. Infrastructure maintenance? Gutted. The remaining workers are wearing ten hats at once. Stretching thin until they snap.
Anyone who sees someone in uniform should hug them. Or high five. But ask first. You don’t want to make it harder for them.
Pearson is blunt about it. The jobs are impossible now. Send them good vibes, she suggests. Or just be quiet and let them work.
The administration is trying to spin “seasonal” employees into nine-month workers. Health insurance included maybe. But no stability. No full-time commitment. It’s a stopgap that masquerades as a strategy.
Broken Systems and Missing Truth
Duffy markets natural beauty. The government provides the rust.
Yosemite’s first weekend of May had a 90-minute queue to get into the gate. Once you got in, the reservation system vanished.
Gone.
Glacier National Park? The Going-to-the-Sun Road reservations are lifted. Acadia? Open sea. It’s a free-for-all. A traffic jam of disillusioned tourists trying to see something they can’t find because too many others are looking at the exact same thing.
Then there’s the culture war.
March 2025 brought an executive order: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum framed it as eliminating inappropriate disparagement. In practice it meant erasing discomfort.
Acadia National Park had its climate change signs taken down.
The Selma to Montgomery Trail underwent a purge. Park staff were forced to identify and remove roughly 80 historical references that didn’t fit the new narrative.
Even Stonewall National Monument in NYC felt the sting. The Pride flag was pulled. Officials in New York City put it right back up.
Hope or Hype?
You could interpret this as urgency. Gas prices are high. The parks are dying. Go see them before they become hollow shells. A morbid tourism.
Pearson hates the thought. It breaks her heart to consider the idea.
But she holds onto something else. Not optimism. Resilience.
Teddy Roosevelt was changed by the Badlands. Maybe you will be too.
Look at Big Bend National Park. When they proposed building a border wall through it, people stood up. Republicans. Democrats. People who normally hate each other. They all said no. Not today.
That’s the point.
You push people too far they snap. You damage a landscape too much it fights back through the people who love it. Pearson believes there’s value left to extract from these places. The geology of the Chihuahuan Desert. The history of the Ancestral Puebloans in New Mexico.
If you go this summer you won’t see perfection. You’ll see crowds. You’ll see missing signs. You might see anger.
But maybe, if you stand still long enough you’ll feel what we’re actually losing.
