January 8, 2026

A new $100 fee for foreign tourists entering US national parks has triggered chaos and frustrating waits, with staff reporting long entry lines as citizenship checks are made and irate visitors regularly ditching plans to patronize some of America’s most cherished landscapes.

Environmental advocates have argued that the newly tiered fees are also illegal under federal law and are suing to reverse them.

January 6, 2025

Visitors to national parks who plan on covering President Donald Trump’s face on their 2026 entrance passes may face additional fees.

The announcement also included changes in entrance fees based on citizenship status, as well as other new policies. Park visitors who are not U.S. residents must now pay $250 for an annual pass, compared with $80 for U.S. residents.

December 13, 2025

The NPS Deputy Director of Operations said that roughly one to five percent of people should receive an outstanding rating and confirmed several times that about 80 percent should receive 3s.

The order appears to violate the Code of Federal Regulations, said Tim Whitehouse, a lawyer and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

December 12, 2025

At the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, Executive Director Emily Thompson said that, "park superintendents are under an immense amount of pressure to meet arbitrary ratings as they appraise their employees' performance. Superintendents are being directed to rate nearly all employees, regardless of their accomplishments, at no higher than a 3 — which has traditionally been viewed as a barely passing, “C” grade."

December 12, 2025

As National Park Service leaders grapple with reduced staffing and restrictive, ideological policies, maintenance workers at Yosemite National Park are now also facing a pay cut in 2026 that could reduce hourly wages by as much as $3.50 for some positions.

That’s after the National Park Service told its staff that pay for newly hired or promoted employees will now be based on rates for the Fresno area, instead of Stockton, as they have been for the last 16 years.

December 12, 2025

The National Park Service has downgraded some the performance ratings given to staffers under guidance from the Trump administration to reduce the number of federal employees getting high marks in annual evaluations.

NPS Deputy Director for Operations Frank Lands told supervisors that roughly 80 percent of employees should be earning at least a 3 rating out of 5.

November 7, 2025

A visitor found graffiti and toilet paper on a popular trail near one of the park’s iconic geologic formations.

“Matthis believes the graffiti in Arches is directly the result of the shutdown. It’s located in a well-trafficked area near an iconic destination. If the park were fully staffed, she said, vandals would have likely been scared off by patrolling rangers.”

November 4, 2025

While some national parks are seeing damage and illegal activity during the government shutdown, Doug Burgum is traveling around the Middle East, selling American gas and oil.

“As national parks are either closed or operating on skeleton crews, I can’t imagine anything more disconnected than for the secretary of interior to jet off to these places and schmooze with oil oligarchs,” said Representative Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Mr. Huffman questioned whether Mr. Burgum flew on commercial or private planes and at what cost to taxpayers.

October 31, 2025

Until recently, Forrest Smith was the sole employee at the National Park Service responsible for cleaning up dozens of abandoned oil and gas wellsat national parks across the country. But last month, the Park Service did not renew Mr. Smith’s four-year contract.

Now it is unclear whether anyone will clean up an estimated 93 abandoned wells on federal lands managed by the Park Service.

October 22, 2025

A leading theory among park service advocates and experts is that, as with other government agencies, the Trump administration is making the park service inept intentionally, in order to privatize more of its functions. Park service budget is “operational budget,” Jarvis explains, used for wages, utilities, emergency response, and other necessities. “You can’t just pull a billion dollars out of that and expect the park to operate. So the premise is, you’re setting the parks up to fail.”

September 20, 2025

The removals come after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March seeking to remove “improper partisan ideology” from federal institutions.

The National Park Service has removed signs at Acadia National Park in Maine that make reference to climate change amid the Trump administration’s wider effort to remove information that it says undermines “the remarkable achievements of the United States.” A sign has also been removed from at least one additional park that referred to slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and conflicts with Native Americans.

September 17, 2025

Angela Val, the CEO of Visit Philadelphia, the city's tourism marketing organization, expects the administration to edit or remove panels from the President's House site. If that happens, Val says her organization will try to find a private location nearby to display the banned material. She points out that banning information can sometimes boomerang and bring it more attention.

"The moment you tell somebody they can't do something or can't read something," Val says, they "immediately want to do it."

Critics say the erasure -- later reversed -- shows the Trump administration won’t stop at just targeting transgender identity.

In February, the NPS removed all mentions of transgender individuals from the monument’s website to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order. In June, the NPS banned the display of the transgender Pride flag and the Progress Pride flag. In response, visitors began mounting unauthorized Pride flags at the site in protest.

Donna Graves couldn’t believe it when she heard that the LGBTQ+ exhibit she created at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond, California, was in jeopardy. Walking through the airy brick building in mid-June, a former World War II factory turned visitor center, she stopped in front of the exhibit’s three tall free-standing signs. One of them read “Changing History” in big, bold letters on top. Sunlight streamed through the windows behind them, while the sound of archival newsreels wafted over from the next room…

Mr. Trump has proposed hacking the Park Service’s operating budget by roughly 30 percent, which would be catastrophic, and transferring less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states and tribal governments.

Crosscurrents’ Sunni Khalid shares what she’s hearing from National Park rangers, biologists, and custodians about how this administration is affecting the nation’s public lands. In the short term, park staff warn of dirty bathrooms but in the long term, they worry about the lasting damage these cuts will have to the landscape.

The resources that generations of Americans have protected for their enjoyment and inspiration are coveted by a wide range of vested interests.

Those wishing to develop, prospect, mine, hunt, trap, harvest, irrigate, and generally extract something from nature’s last refuges are persistent and powerful. Successful defense against piecemeal dismantling of our national parks has often depended on a science-based analysis of predictable impacts provided by central office scientists and resource managers.

A longstanding program connecting young adults from diverse backgrounds with summer jobs in the National Park Service was canceled indefinitely earlier this spring. The National Park Service Academy was a partnership between the National Park Service and the American Conservation Experience, a nonprofit organization providing environmental service opportunities for young adults and “emerging professionals.” This summer would’ve been the program’s 15th year, according to a job posting for the now-defunct cohort.

On the cultural side, [Washington] (and to a greater extent than in natural resources) the regional offices maintain curatorial experts, cultural landscape architects, agency historians, restoration experts, historical architects, and the like. If these programs are decimated, all but the largest parks will be on their own for expertise in their attempts to achieve the fundamental purpose in the NPS Organic Act — to conserve the natural and cultural resources of the parks unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

Park advocates and others criticized the move and questioned how park employees could comply, given the Trump administration’s workforce reductions through voluntary separation offers, layoffs and an earlier hiring freeze. Fewer workers can mean shorter hours, delays, closed campgrounds, overflowing trash bins, unkept bathrooms, and risks to public safety, they say.

The move, following weeks of backlash and protest, affects around 1,000 employees.

Despite the order's call for exceptions for "disaster relief or natural disaster response benefits or operations or other critical services as determined by the Agency Head," Interior employees say the spending limit combined with restrictions on travel is affecting critical Interior Department work across the nation, particularly in far-flung regional offices that have unique needs.

NPS regional offices are threatened with significant reduction or closure.

Those who propose such folly do not understand that one of the reasons the public consistently enjoys their parks is because a small group of regional professionals is making sure the parks are well-run, accountable and up to standards

When British novelist J.B. Priestley visited the Grand Canyon in the 1930s, he described it as "all of Beethoven's nine symphonies in stone and magic light."

Federal workers help maintain millions of acres of protected land — and with climate change intensifying burns, conditions are ripe for disaster

The anticipated cuts come as the Interior Department has already eliminated 2,300 positions, including 1,000 that were reported to be part of the Park Service.

Without federal funding and support from agency partners, trail stewardship organizations are struggling to keep maintenance projects afloat.

Retirees warn that staff reductions and seasonal hiring chaos could affect visitors and imperil natural resources