The park is supposed to be a refuge. It’s starting to feel like the Mall of America with waterfalls.

That’s because the Trump administration fired roughly 1,000 National Park Service employees in February 2025 and has since cut about 24 percent of the agency’s permanent staff. The Supreme Court overruled a lower court order to reinstate them. So the parks are now entering summer with fewer rangers, fewer maintenance crews, and fewer people trained to handle emergencies — at exactly the moment the administration flung the gates wide open and waved everyone in.

The land itself is already stressed in ways that have nothing to do with parking. A March 2026 study found that 77 percent of U.S. national parks are highly vulnerable to climate change — threatened by wildfire, drought, pest outbreaks, and rising seas. The glaciers John Muir wrote about are mostly gone. Fire seasons run into November. The park is absorbing record visitor numbers while fighting for its ecological survival.

But Trump’s approach isn’t accidental negligence. It’s malice with a strategy.

Degrade the parks — cut the staff, end the reservation systems, invite a stampede — and use the resulting damage as justification for opening federal land to logging, mining, and development