The summer season is almost here, and millions of Americans are making plans to visit the national parks they grew up with — Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. What most of them don't know is that the agency responsible for those parks is being quietly dismantled, even as billions of dollars get pumped into fountain repairs and beautification projects in Washington D.C.
The numbers tell a stark story. The Trump administration's 2027 budget proposal is asking for a cut of more than 25 percent to the National Park Service's operating budget — somewhere in the neighborhood of $736 million. At the same time, a $17.4 million no-bid contract was handed to a private construction company to fix two fountains in Lafayette Square, a block from the White House. For context, those same fountains were estimated to cost around $3.3 million to fix back in 2022. Interior Department officials blamed inflation and a tight timeline for the price jump.
That timeline, it turns out, was driven by a desire to have everything looking sharp in time for the country's 250th anniversary celebrations.
The Company Behind the Contract
The construction firm that landed that fountain deal is called Clark Construction — the same company the Trump administration hired to build the controversial $400 million White House ballroom, a project the president has said will be covered by private donors.
The fountain contract, however, is a different story. The money for that job likely came from fees paid by national park visitors — dollars that were specifically set aside for critical projects across the park system. Those funds are supposed to go toward things like building trails, restoring habitat, keeping visitor infrastructure running, and supporting educational programs throughout the country's 433 parks and historical sites.
John Garder, a senior director of budget and appropriations with the National Parks Conservation Association, said the lack of transparency around these spending decisions is a serious problem.
"There is a significant lack of transparency about all of these projects," he said. "It would be inappropriate, to say the least, to direct the fee dollars to large, new construction projects. That is not what the money was intended for."
Kristen Brengel, a longtime national park policy expert whose office happens to overlook the recently restored Lafayette Square fountains, put it more bluntly.
"The reality is, here in Washington DC, these fountains are lovely and part of an experience when you come here. Does that need to be expedited and funded to the highest degree? Right now? Is that the highest priority? No," she said. "It's more about vanity than protecting park resources."
What's Already Been Lost
To understand how serious the situation has become, it helps to look at what was already in place before this round of cuts.
In 2020, during Trump's first term, the Great American Outdoors Act was signed into law. It dedicated $1.3 billion per year over five years specifically for deferred maintenance — a backlog of repairs that had been piling up for decades across the park system — as well as money to improve recreation, education, and visitor experiences. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law added more funding on top of that, and together these two pieces of legislation represented a genuine effort to modernize and repair the park system at a scale that visitor fee dollars alone could never match.
Garder described it as money the parks desperately needed — "much bigger than fee dollars could provide by an economy of scale."
For a few years, parks were finally making headway. Then 2025 arrived.
The Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, began aggressively cutting federal staff. National Park Service employees were pushed toward early resignations. The losses were severe enough that the total number of full-time park staff dropped by 24 percent. That came on top of roughly 2,000 positions that had already disappeared between 2011 and 2024 due to years of underfunding from Congress.
The practical consequences of that kind of staffing collapse are easy to imagine for anyone who has spent time in the parks. Fewer people at visitor centers. Fewer people manning fee booths. Fewer maintenance crews keeping trails and facilities functional. But it goes deeper than that. The cuts also gutted the ranks of biologists, archaeologists, air quality specialists, and water quality experts — the scientists and technical staff whose work underpins everything from habitat management to compliance with environmental regulations.
Visitation Is Up, But Support Is Falling
Here's what makes the situation especially frustrating for park advocates: visitation numbers are at historic highs. Americans love their national parks. Public opinion surveys consistently show broad, bipartisan support for the park system. The parks have the public behind them.
But instead of meeting that demand with adequate resources, the Interior Department has been pulling in the opposite direction. Timed-entry restrictions at Arches National Park were ended. Advanced reservation requirements at Glacier and Yosemite — two of the most visited parks in the country — were dropped. More people are being encouraged to show up at parks that now have a quarter fewer employees to serve them.
During the 43-day government shutdown last fall, which became the longest in U.S. history, most parks stayed open — but with no staff at fee booths to collect entrance money from the millions of visitors passing through.
Then came April 3rd. The White House released its 2027 budget proposal, and the scope of what was being proposed was significant even by the standards of the past year. The plan calls for a 72 percent cut to the NPS general construction budget. It proposes eliminating another 3,000 permanent NPS staff positions. And it establishes a $10 billion fund called the "Presidential Capital Stewardship Program," dedicated to construction and rehabilitation projects in the Washington D.C. area.
What This Means for Hunters and Fishermen
The conversation around national parks often focuses on hiking, camping, and scenic views, but there's a dimension of this story that doesn't get nearly enough attention: hunting and fishing.
Hunting is permitted on 76 properties managed by the National Park Service. Fishing is allowed on 213 of them. And even in areas where hunting isn't directly taking place, national parks serve as critical habitat for game species that move freely across the landscape regardless of where the boundary signs are posted.
Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers and a career park professional who spent decades working in and eventually supervising park units, laid it out plainly.
"Wildlife and fish don't recognize the boundaries of national parks, so anything that occurs that can have some impact on whether or not wildlife can navigate in and out of parks is an issue," Wade said.
That means the cuts to research and science positions aren't just an abstract policy problem. They're a wildlife management problem. Healthy populations of deer, elk, pronghorn, trout, and dozens of other species depend on consistent, science-based management. They depend on experts who monitor air quality and water quality, who track population trends, who can flag problems before they become crises. Cutting those positions doesn't just affect the parks — it affects the broader ecosystem those parks sit within, and by extension, the hunting and fishing opportunities that millions of Americans count on every year.
The Broader Picture
For the people who spend their careers fighting for the park system, the current situation represents something more troubling than just a budget dispute. It represents a fundamental shift in what the government thinks national parks are for.
Wade, Garder, and Brengel all acknowledge that many sites in the D.C. area do need attention and maintenance. Nobody is arguing that the capital should look run-down. But the question they keep coming back to is one of priorities — and transparency.
Why is a fountain repair project getting a no-bid contract worth more than five times its original estimate while parks across the country are losing a quarter of their workforce? Why is visitor fee money — collected specifically to maintain and improve parks nationwide — potentially being redirected toward large construction projects in the nation's capital? Why is the administration pushing for higher visitation numbers while simultaneously cutting the staff needed to support those visitors?
Garder didn't mince words about what he thinks needs to happen.
"The best thing the administration can do for our national parks," he said, "is to retract their draconian budget, rehire the thousands of people they pressured to leave, and push for both the staffing and the repair money that can restore parks not only in our nation's capital, but throughout the country."
What Comes Next
The 2027 budget proposal is just that — a proposal. Congress will have its say, and there will be advocates on both sides of the aisle pushing to restore or protect various line items. The National Parks Conservation Association and allied organizations are already mobilizing, as they have been throughout the past year of cuts and closures.
But the damage already done — the staff who have left, the maintenance that has continued to pile up, the science that isn't being conducted — doesn't simply reverse itself when a new budget passes. The NPS was already fighting a decades-long battle against deferred maintenance and inadequate staffing before any of this started. Every year that passes without addressing those underlying problems makes the recovery harder.
Americans who care about these places — whether they come for the views, the history, the hunting, or the fishing — are watching what happens next. The parks belong to everyone, and the decisions being made in Washington right now will shape them for decades to come.
