US President Donald Trump's administration is making deep cuts at the National Park Service (NPS), and after firing around 1,000 of its employees last month the White House is now moving to close 34 NPS offices across the country by cancelling their leases. Those facilities support visitor centres, law enforcement units, operations staff, museums and climate-controlled artefact storage for national parks from Alaska to Texas and Florida.
Among the targeted locations is the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park, the only Unesco World Heritage site in Texas. Theresa Pierno, the president and chief executive of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), warned in a statement that the loss of staff and of critical facilities "are pushing our parks past the point of no return". She adds: "It is reckless and short-sighted to close National Park Service offices without a careful examination of what they protect and the critical staff who work there. These closures will cripple the Park Service’s ability to operate parks safely and will mean millions of irreplaceable artefacts will be left vulnerable or worse, lost. Quite simply and astonishingly, this is dismantling the National Park Service as we know it, ranger by ranger and brick by brick."
At the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park, lease cancellation would impact its law enforcement facility, which houses first responders, information technology professionals, equipment storage space and artefacts from the Spanish colonial period. The park—which brings together five 18th-century Franciscan missions along the San Antonio River—represents the Northern frontier of New Spain, an imperial border that forever changed the landscape of the region. As the Catholic settlers mingled with Indigenous Coahuiltecan nomads prior to US annexation, South Texan culture began to take shape, creating a rich tapestry of oral histories, records and architecture.
The NPCA , a non-partisan body founded in 1919, has released a comprehensive list of the 34 NPS leases that are bring targeted. They include the Fairbanks Alaska Public Lands Information Center in Fairbanks, Alaska, which provides assistance and information to millions of visitors each year, and the Robert Johnson Building in Tallahassee, Florida, which houses the climate-controlled Southeast Archeological Center that contains over 8 million artefacts for dozens of Southeastern national park sites.
The lease cancellations follow mass demonstrations after Yosemite National Park, an environmental jewel and California tourist mainstay, was plunged into chaos amid mass staffing cuts. The administration suspended the park’s reservation system, lowered the employee credit card limit to a single dollar, and laid off 5% of the employees.
Protests have erupted across the US in response to cuts to the NPS. Despite Trump and the Republican party’s emphatic insistence on reining in government spending, the parks budget represents less than one-fifteenth of one percent of the federal budget, while contributing $55.6bn to the US economy and supporting more than 400,000 jobs in 2023.