Frustrated By Legalities, Interior Plans Re-Org To Eliminate More Employees:

Why attempt to pivot away from the regional management model? Management in the national park service is made up of career park service professionals, not political appointees. This makes them somewhat immune to the machinations of any individual administration since they follow larger management directives approved by Congress, and enjoy the career protections typical across the civil service. Changing the structure within which those managers work is one of the only ways to eliminate their jobs, although it remains legally dubious.

Parks PAC, the first ever political action committee created to defend national parks, explains to me that this is a deliberate effort to break the park service, and then use the fact that it’s broken to attempt selling off some national parks.

“The Trump Administration wants to double down on its historically unpopular attacks on our National Park system, called ‘America’s Best Idea,’ by closing regional offices, laying off even more staff and shuttering facilities,” Parks PAC explains. “This is the plunder of our history, our culture, and our landscapes, done quietly because it could not survive being done in the open.”

The unstated goal here is to degrade management in the National Park Service to the point where its disarray can be held up as evidence that the parks no longer financially justify their existence.

And that’s part of the administration’s stated goal of privatizing operations in the big “crown jewel” parks, while selling off smaller, lesser visited units. Nationwide, the park service manages 433 individual sites, ranging from the big parks like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, on down to historic battlefields or National Historic Sites as small as individual homes.

The National Park Conservation Association warned that the $1.2 billion cut to the park service’s budget that the White House proposed last year could have forced the sale of up to 350 of those smaller sites.

Right now, the NPS operates on an appropriated annual budget of only $3.2 billion. Less than the cost of two days of Trump’s illegal war on Iran.

Selling off national parks has been an explicit and stated goal of Burgum’s tenure at DOI. Last June, he testified to Congress that selling national parks was, “on the table.”

Source: Wes Siler