Trump plan could offload hundreds of national park sites to states

E&E News

27-05-2025

Angela Bates spent six years trying to get the National Park Service to take over the tiny homesteader town founded by her great-grandparents in Kansas, a testament to African Americans' attempts after the end of slavery to build a new life for themselves on the expansive Western prairies.
Now the Trump administration's efforts to downsize the U.S. government threaten to walk back protections for the huddle of five old buildings called the Nicodemus National Historic Site. President Donald Trump's budget plan could remove what's become a gold standard for preservation not just for Bates' town but for hundreds of places of historical significance across the country that are managed by NPS.
'Just to write it off because of economics, it needs to be looked at again,' said Bates, whose great-grandmother's family was enslaved on the plantation of a former vice president before gaining freedom, moving to Kansas and helping found Nicodemus. 'This is what makes this country great. … We're committed to making sure that our country and our history here is not forgotten.'
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The Trump administration released a preliminary budget plan for fiscal 2026 earlier this month that would shift less popular national parks to state management, suggesting this could cull about $900 million in federal spending.
The proposal echoes the White House's larger agenda of shrinking a government that it says has gotten too big. The budget proposal could pit the Trump administration against Congress, which created most of the country's national park sites and passed the laws that mandate the National Park Service preserve them for future generations.
The proposal has sparked a wave of anxiety among park supporters.
'It's incredibly concerning to me,' said Dan Wenk, who served as park superintendent at Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore before his retirement in 2018. Wenk said the budget proposal would drastically reshape the national park system as it's known today and could burden state and local governments that may be ill-equipped to handle the sites.
Some Republicans have shrugged off the import of Trump's proposal, saying it likely won't come to pass.
'It's a tempest in a teapot,' said Rob Wallace, who served as an assistant secretary of the Interior during the first Trump administration. Wallace said the first administration's work to fund national parks through the Great American Outdoors Act is proof of the president's commitment to supporting parks.
The budget proposal, by contrast, could have come from Trump administration staffers who are new to the federal government and unaware of the way national parks work, he said.
'There's a learning curve,' he said.
Congressional Republicans, who under federal law would need to act to strip national park designations, were skeptical of the idea last week in a pair of appropriations hearings with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
'I'm trying to figure out exactly how this would work, and I'm kind of thinking it's like me putting my kids in charge of the upkeep for the house that I own,' said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee for Interior and Environment and a senior Republican lawmaker from Alaska with power over Interior's budget.
Around Nicodemus, the fact that the site is a national park is significant. The park is one of the only draws to a county plagued by drought conditions, falling farm revenues and a weak oil industry. Last year, visitors numbered 7,535, or more than triple the size of Graham County's population.
'If we lost the Nicodemus historical site, that would be terrible,' said Jarrod Knoll, a Republican commissioner in Graham County, where Nicodemus is located. 'We need all the draws we can get.'
Reaching $900 million
It's not yet clear what parks the Trump administration would target if it tries to move forward.
The National Park Service directed questions on the budget proposal to the White House, which did not respond to questions for this story.
In its budget proposal, the White House's Office of Management and Budget says many parks receiving 'small numbers of mostly local visitors' are 'better categorized and managed as State-level parks.'
'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,' the OMB wrote. A more expanded budget plan is expected in the coming weeks.
Burgum clarified to skeptical lawmakers during budget hearings last week that the proposal would not target the more than 60 'crown jewels' of the national park system. Those parks, like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite, are the most well known, although according to NPS statistics accounted for just 28 percent of visits.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testifies during an appropriations hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
'The national parks with the capital N and capital P — the 63 national parks — none of those are under consideration for transfer,' Burgum said. He said the proposal was targeted at 'historic sites, cultural sites that … have got low visitation, primarily local, that might better fit into a state historic society site or some other designation.'
The national park system totals 433 sites. They include homes of historical figures, such as property owned by Clara Barton, Andrew Johnson or Frederick Douglass, and parks that preserve significant landscapes, such as the Poverty Point National Monument in northeast Louisiana, which protects ancient Native American earthworks in a part of the state with not many other tourist attractions.
Burgum declined to provide a list of park sites that could be transferred to states. He said the department was very early in the process of figuring out where the idea could work.
'I think this is going to be a case by case, state by state,' he said when asked by lawmakers to produce a list of park sites that could be transferred. 'We will send you it when we have the plan.'
Without those details, it's unclear how the administration reached its $900 million savings estimate. Burgum implied that amount could come from more than just offloading parks to states in testimony Wednesday but did not elaborate.
Because of the smaller budgets associated with smaller park sites, advocates say reaching even close to a figure like $900 million would require deep cuts. The National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, estimated NPS would need to wipe out 75 percent of the current agency portfolio to meet that level of savings.
The NPCA reached that number by starting at the budgets for the smallest national park sites and working upward until it reached $900 million in total value. It took 350 locations to hit $900 million.
'You can't cut $900 million from the park service budget and not touch parks that are absolutely massively loved by the public,' said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the NPCA. 'If they think the public will support this, they're dead wrong.'
Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service during the Obama administration, was critical of the proposal. He took issue with the White House's claim that some sites have mostly local visitors, saying that's a conclusion that can't be backed up by the data NPS collects.
'That line that's in their budgetary proposal — is just based on nothing,' he said.
He also disputed that cutting parks is a simple economic benefit. Jarvis said parks increasingly generate local income in the surrounding communities. In 2023, the most recent year that NPS has public data for, parks generated $26.4 billion in gateway communities, many of them rural or low income.
Nicodemus generated nearly a half-million dollars in economic activity in 2023, according to a recent annual economic impact analysis. The site is staffed with three full-time employees but can hire seasonal workers during the summer.
It had a budget of more than $800,000, according to the most recent NPS budget justification. The park has been doing maintenance work on two of the town's buildings in recent years and is looking for funding to begin restoration of one of the historic churches it recently acquired.
Horses graze in front of the schoolhouse from the Nicodemus homestead, which is part of the Nicodemus National Historic Site in Kansas. | Will Pope/National Park Service
The White House's metric to target low-visitation parks would equal just a handful of sites, depending on what the administration qualifies as limited numbers.
Fewer than 30 national park locations saw less than 10,000 visitations last year, among them Nicodemus, and just five of those tallied fewer than 1,000 visitations, according to the park service's annual count.
Looking for a fight
Some national park sites were created by presidents using their authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate national monuments — which could become a factor in any park reduction plan.
Monuments managed by NPS include the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument created in 2023 by former President Joe Biden. The site commemorates a Black boy from Chicago, murdered in 1955 by white men in Mississippi, and the boy's mother, whose decision to publicly show his mutilated body helped catalyze the civil rights movement.
Other NPS-run monuments include the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, which commemorates the riots credited with helping invigorate the gay rights movement in the late 1960s, and the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, which protects forestland in Maine. Both were created by President Barack Obama.
The White House now could be itching for a court fight over monument designations, particularly those that cover a lot of land. Trump shrank two Utah monuments not overseen by the National Park Service in his first term, only to have the move reversed by Biden.
An alumnus of the first Trump administration, William Perry Pendley, argued in the Project 2025 Republican policy blueprint that a conservative president should 'vigorously' defend downsizing national monuments. Pendley said this could prompt a Supreme Court review of what exactly is the presidential power to protect federal lands under the Antiquities Act of 1906.
'They will surely try to do that,' said Bruce Babbitt, who served as the Interior secretary during the Clinton administration and who is closely watching the fight over the NPS budget. Babbitt said the question of whether presidents can designate large national monuments was put to bed after President Theodore Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon National Monument at the turn of the last century and a fight over the designation landed at the Supreme Court.
'The court said the Antiquities Act gives discretion to the president to declare national monuments. Period,' Babbitt said.
Although there were lawsuits over Trump's Utah actions, there was no final ruling from courts because Biden re-expanded the monuments after taking office. The Trump administration is reportedly mulling reducing the size of some national monuments.
'One might try to argue, because of the last Trump administration, that Antiquities Act designations could be vulnerable,' said Brengel with the NPCA.
But Brengel added that legal scholars have found that only Congress can reverse or resize a national monument created by a president.
Congress also placed a legal burden on the National Park Service in the General Authorities Act of 1970 to create and protect areas 'distinct in character' and 'united through their interrelated purposes and resources into one national park system as cumulative expressions of a single national heritage.'
Wenk, the former superintendent, questioned if states have the capacity to take up those responsibilities.
'That's a big question that would have to be answered. I don't think it's an automatic assumption that it's true,' he said.
David Vela, who served as acting National Park Service director during the first Trump administration, said the irony of the Trump budget proposal is that state parks face the same challenges that NPS has been dealing with, such as overcrowding, pressures to privatize, and limited money for maintenance and conservation.
A challenge for Congress
Republican lawmakers said they would need to be part of any Trump administration plan to reimagine the park service.
Murkowski told Burgum in the Wednesday hearing that the proposal could 'make good sense' in some places, but she was unconvinced that it could be a broad practice without harming parks and communities.
'I hope that we have a really thorough conversation with you to better understand the justification for the proposal,' she told Burgum.
Rep. Bruce Westerman, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, welcomed a conversation about partnering with states and, in some cases, with private industry to benefit national parks. He pointed to historic bathhouses in Hot Springs, Arkansas — Westerman's hometown — that are leased to private developers by the National Park Service.
'There's certainly areas where states can partner with the federal government, because it benefits the states from a tourism perspective,' he said in an interview when asked about the Trump budget plan.
Westerman said he hadn't looked closely at the Trump proposal. But he noted that Congress holds the authority over national park designations established through a law.
'If it's a park that was created by an act of Congress, that would take a congressional act to divest of those lands,' he said, noting that Congress divesting a park through the appropriations process that's happening now would also require an ambitious two-thirds vote to pass.
'I don't think that's going to happen,' he said.
Historically, proposals to upend the national park system brought by Republicans have swiftly failed. These attempts included when then-House Natural Resources Chair Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) proposed selling 15 national parks to raise money in a budget reconciliation in the early 2000s. The idea was shut down by Democrats and never advanced.
Before that, during the Clinton administration, Rep. Jim Hansen of Utah pushed to unload some national parks, arguing that the agency's budget was stretched so thin that NPS was failing to keep up its most beloved parks.
But the park system emerged unscathed. Two years later, Congress passed a massive public lands bill that created several new park units, among them the Nicodemus National Historic Park in Kansas.
The story of Nicodemus
Nicodemus trod a long road to becoming a national park. The town was made a historic landmark in the 1970s thanks to the Afro American Institute for Historic Preservation. Launched by two brothers, the organization secured federal protections for places across the country that tell the history of Black Americans.
But that designation didn't offer much in terms of financial support or management.
Bates, the descendant of Nicodemus' founders, got involved 20 years later when she created the Nicodemus Historical Society. Around that time, she was introduced to Ira Hutchison, the deputy director of the National Park Service and the first Black American to hold that position. At the time, NPS had just completed a study on the town's historic buildings.
Descendants of the Nicodemus homesteaders at the Nicodemus National Historic Site's visitor center. | National Park Service
The town was aging, and neither residents nor the historical society had the funds to maintain the buildings. Founded in 1877 by formerly enslaved people seeking to escape racism in the South, Nicodemus was the first Black homesteading community established west of the Mississippi River.
'It represents what African Americans did with their freedom,' Bates said.
Nicodemus is the only Black homesteading community in the Midwest that survives today and one of the few historical markers within the park system telling the story of Black Americans during the Reconstruction era.
On these grounds, Hutchison encouraged Bates to begin the work to apply for a national park designation. Republican Bob Dole — then a Kansas senator — was an early champion of the designation and penned the legislation to make Nicodemus a national park.
'Too often, the tragic legacy of the Civil War was that Blacks traded the chains of slavery for poverty, prejudice and persecution,' Dole said at the time. 'The free soil of Nicodemus allowed Blacks to flourish.'
The National Park Service completed the required study to ensure the town met the criteria of national significance, and in 1996, as part of a bipartisan omnibus public lands bill, Nicodemus' two churches, a school, a township hall and a hotel entered the park system with the signature of President Bill Clinton.
Through all these years, Bates said in the back of her mind she knew the park protections could be rolled back someday.
It would be a shame if that happened, she said, but she emphasized that the story of Nicodemus would carry on.
'A stroke of any man's signature on a piece of paper doesn't erase anything, doesn't do anything to that history,' she said. 'Nicodemus, if it ever gets cut as being one of the national parks, it doesn't mean that Nicodemus doesn't exist, doesn't mean that the history has been erased. The history is here.'
Reporter Garrett Downs contributed.