Are you planning on visiting a national park, a national monument, or a national historic site in the next few years? Good luck with that.
The National Parks and Conservation Association reports the Trump administration’s 2026 budget plan proposes cutting $900 million from the agency’s budget. If enacted, this would be the largest cut in the agency’s 109-year history.
It would gut our national park system. The National Parks and Conservation Association calculates that this huge budget cut could result in the closure of “over 350 parks – three quarters of the National Park System.”
The administration proposes unloading the national parks on to the states. Did anyone pay attention to the tense state budget discussions in our recently-concluded session of the Nevada Legislature?
What appetite do you think Nevada – or any other state for that matter – would have to fund and manage huge new additions to their state park systems?
We simply could not do it, especially with Trump’s efforts to dump responsibility for many other services and programs formerly performed by the federal government onto states with already-stretched budgets.
What would more likely happen is those unfunded national parks — which belong to the people of the U.S. — would be either privatized or sold. And that would be a theft and a shame.
Anne Macquarie
Carson City