If we could dig up and reanimate the corpse of Teddy Roosevelt, I’m pretty sure he’d go rampaging through the halls of the White House looking for people to punch in the throat. Of course, he’d have several motivations for this, but the lack of respect for our National Parks would be chief among them.
President Donald Trump’s budget released Monday recommends extreme staffing cuts of nearly 2,000 National Park Service rangers at a time when national park visitation is at an all-time high.
The president’s budget proposes a drastic 16 percent cut to the Department of the Interior, which houses the National Park Service, and a cut of seven percent to the park service itself. In 2016, the national parks received record visitation rates of nearly 331 million visits. Cuts to park staff could lead to a reduction in services to the public, closed facilities, and heavier workloads for remaining staff.
These are the types of sacrifices we are asked to make so that Republicans can please their donors with gigantic tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. But even the Rockefellers saw the value in our parks. The current crop of nihilists sees nothing but dollar signs, and if it isn’t nailed down they think it should be privatized or defunded.
Think about the idea of firing two thousand park rangers. We only have fifty-nine full-fledged National Parks. If even we took just one ranger from each of the roughly 350 smaller sites within the system, that’s still 27 fewer rangers each at Yellowstone, at the Grand Canyon, at Yosemite, and so on down the list. That’s not just unjustifiable carnage, it’s impossible to see how it wouldn’t badly impact maintenance, safety, and service.
Of course, the administration’s budget is a just a list of priorities, not a law. Hopefully, the Republicans who are serving on the appropriations subcommittees that handle the Department of the Interior will take this proposal and trampoline it to the moon.
I could be wrong about this, but I think funding for our National Parks is one area where almost everybody actually feels good about government expenditures. So, in addition to being stupid and awful, this proposal is also probably very bad politics.
Does Trumpy seem like the kind of guy who has ever been to a National Park? Doubtful. And about selling everything that isn’t nailed down, did you see he wants to sell Dulles and Reagan airports??
I often remind myself of this. In fact, I doubt many in the WH go to National Parks, and NONE appreciates them.
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Probably not even Zinke who actually comes from a state with several famous parks.
Truly, “The Cabinet of Dr. Trump”
No. However, he was seen at the Lincoln Memorial, a national monument that along with a goodly chunk of DC is administered by the NPS. Will NPS or the WH select where to cut rangers?
wrt to the airports — the leaseholder, MWAA, may have something to say about a proposed sale.
Jesus Fucking Christ, these people are arch villains.
The Parties are not the same, Chapter MDCLXVI.
So what’s the significance of 1666 (MDCLXVI). Was it: According to manuscripts, Isaac Newton witnesses the falling of an apple on this day, which leads him to discover gravity.
More like DCLXVI
Lamar loves his parks. I’m gonna troll his ass so bad.
Chad Pergram is my go-to reporter for Congress on twitter. Right after the budget was released, he wrote that Congress was expected to ignore it.
So often Park Rangers live in the small towns closeby where there’s no work available when they’re laid off and the towns rely on the tourist attraction of the park so first we see international tourism down that’s lost billions to the economy and now we’ll see rural towns lose tourism as well.
The park rangers we have here locally work their asses off. They ride up into the mountains to bring injured or lost tourists down, sometimes taking 8 days to round trip it. They sit with binoculars in hand on mountaintops looking for wildfire starts. They train all ages to understand and recognize what each park is offering them. They capture dangerous wildlife and relocate them.
Yeah, I could get riled up over this action if it takes place.
In 2017 I visited Arches on a Monday, middle of Sept, after school started. Park gates had been open over three hours, and there was a line of at least a hundred cars to get in, probably more. Thousands were already in the park, on a weekday!
It’s a lot of damn work dealing with the thousands who show up every day, most of whom don’t have a clue.
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But perhaps that’s a topic for another day.
Mulvaney is a sociopath and a corrupt one too. You may recall that he came out with his first budget last year that went nowhere because of all the Obamacare repeal nonsense. At the time, he said he put it together based on reading Trump’s speeches and it contained amazingly insane proposals that would have paralyzed the government (except, of course, defense). While I can’t be sure, I don’t recall Trump saying anything at all about the NPS or the need to transform SNAP into physical boxed deliveries of canned goods. This is Mulvaney’s rabid Tea Party extremism. This is another proposal that is DOA, especially in an election year.
Mulvaney is another real estate developer. Apparently one like Trump.
I also don’t remember Trump running on cutting the Department of Health and Human Services by 21% in the middle of multiple health crises, with a meaningful portion of said cuts happening in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Yet, there they are in Orange Mussolini’s budget.
I despise self-styled “liberals” who continue to claim there’s no difference between the Parties with the heat of a thousand suns.
Property owners near national parks often do not feel thrilled about the auslanders coming into their neighborhoods with their Democratic bumper stickers and high expectations. It’s bad enough in the Appalachians; fishing hooks strung on the Appalachian Trail in TN for example. In the the Yellowstone area there is rampant poaching and even senseless killing of the Park’s bison herds. And then there are the ranchers grazing without payment on National Park land as well as other public lands.
This is a sop to capture the Sagebrush Rebellion folks who want to own some of that national park land for themselves. Condos at Yosemite and other such nonsense. Government is only for wars and keeping slaves on the plantation, you know.
People would feel that uniform warm feelings about national parks if they had the wages and salaries that allowed them to visit them and if they had not become so crowded and beset by folks who were not the 1950s middle class.
This is a litmus test issue for the voting base. If they let this go down the tubes, we are in tough shape as a nation.
Can the Democrats do anything helpful at this point, given that their sole power is to stop but only when the Republicans are divided.
National Parks are too tempting a target for hippie-punching. Where is Smokey the Bear (yes, Forest Service, Marie3) when you need him?
Just came back from a family vacation to Big Island Hawaii.
We visited the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and it still was amazing (since our first visit in the mid 90s). Though we could not hike to see the lava flow (it was almost a 6 mile hike over rough terrain) that we saw earlier, the unnatural beauty of this park reminded us that we need to be good stewards of our natural beauty for the generations to come.
I am hoping for some hopeful signs (starting next month with the PA special election) and the changeover in November of our legislative chamber(s), that would be the first step in reversing this wanton destruction.
Right now it feels like this airplane is in the grips of a severe air pocket turbulence. But the long arc of history bends inevitable towards justice, no matter how hopeless it might feel at any instant of peril!
My wife works for the Forest Service (International Programs) and she works a lot with National Forest staff and associated communities. They are popular with local, almost always rural, Republican voting people. They understand that Forest Service is crucial in protecting watersheds they rely on, prevent/fight forest fires and provide facilities that attract tourist camping and hikes. this is a big deal in these communities. The A-Holes in Trump’s Administration understand none of this or give a damn if they did.
I hope that that mood that has been the norm still is true almost everywhere. But those same rural areas are the ones that have been most transformed by the right-wing shock jocks 24/7.
I have been surprised at the shift in my own relatives in rural areas.
. . . bull trout, Gloria Flora.
Um, the White House itself and its surroundings are a National Park.
. . . will be fired.
At least not if Trump can see any benefit or service to himself of the ranger’s continued employment.
And security (rangering) for the DC government history sites can be easily contracted to some private company and shortchanged.
We don’t need Rangers after the parks are sold to private interests next year.
I live in a community with some significant historical sites administered by the National Park Service. For those interested in frontier tourism, those sites have plenty to offer. In addition, the staff offer any of a number of educational events throughout the year. Off the top of my head, I am not sure what that translates into dollars and cents, but the area offers us locals an excuse to get to the downtown and undoubtedly keeps downtown businesses viable. Layoffs to staff would certainly do our community no favors. Heck, we’re still trying to shake off the effects of that last recession. Herr Combover sure seem hell-bent on making sure we never do.
These guys are blocking somebody’s profits:
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Excellence
Another Win for America. I can tell you this, I’m getting sick of so much winning, just like Trump promised.