Cuts to US national parks and forests met with backlash | Hacker News Reader

Cuts to US national parks and forests met with backlash

bbc.com

73 pointsthrow0101c46 comments

I'm traveling around the western US in my campervan for the last month going between various parks.

Lesser known NP's aren't even checking people at the gate on the way in. I've been able to (leave no trace) boondock easily within the boundaries by finding side roads or even just staying the night in a dead end parking lot. Something I probably wouldn't have tried when it is more busy.

If this is what it is like to see the park without staff, when warmer weather hits and the parks begin to really fill up, it is going to be a mess. Some of the parks seem to be under various forms of winter expansion and construction of campgrounds, I wonder how they will service the growth.

Maybe this happens to be the perfect time right now to be doing this then. The irony for me is that this travel is only possible for me because of Starlink. Thanks Elon?

> wonder how they will service the growth

They won’t. The next step will be illegal harvesting of resources from public lands going unpunished.

BLM is huge, remote and hard to regulate. Wouldn't that already be happening if it was easy to do at scale?

BLM controls the shit land. The only people who want it are ranchers for grazing. Our Parks and Forests contain vast resource and cultural wealth.

What I've found is that the parks I'm visiting are surrounded by BLM. There are tons of backroads that go in and out of the parks through BLM, without anyone watching the gates.

Great places to boondock too.

What is the expansion of BLM? Bureau of Land Management?

Yes. https://www.blm.gov/

> I've been able to (leave no trace) boondock easily within the boundaries by finding side roads or even just staying the night in a dead end parking lot.

Just for reference, I tried this in various parks about ~15 years ago (before most parks were overwhelmed with people), and always got called out before I even had a chance to start sleeping.

I asked the ranger at the gate of one NP if there is a closing time for the park and he laughed and said the park is open 24 hours. One campground in the park was full on reserve'murica and nearly empty when I drove by it.

Why drive out of the park to find BLM when I could just stay there in the park? So, I used google maps and found a little side road at the end of a trail parking lot, where you had to drive up a curb and through a gate (which was open)... drove down about a mile out of sight and parked.

Most people are in big RV's and need hookups or sleep in tents, so they shouldn't do this. I'm totally off grid, LNT, and self-sufficient for weeks at a time. Not bothering anyone or over staying my time there. I actually wouldn't mind seeing more people do it this way.

Yes, the stars are beyond amazing at night.

latchkey, I don't know why your reply is straight [dead]. You're just describing the apparent dynamic these days, to the extent it's indicative of overall decay that's not on you. Whenever I got called out by rangers, I would invariably be directed to a campsite. There was always room. Obviously before this reserve'murica dynamic that apparently makes campsites something like concert tickets or NYC restaurant tables.

The times I would try to sleep rougher in my car was when I was coming from FS/BLM land where it's more of a free for all, I got in late, and wasn't planning on staying at the NP very long.

Eventually I got used to the idea that the Parks have much more stringent rules and controls precisely because they are designated parks. You're not in some raw state of being in nature, but rather more like a highly-trafficked museum - they built roads and put a dot on the map attracting throngs of humans that need to be managed.

My and your reply got killed. Interesting moderation going on here @dang.

Can they partly work around this using drones? They should be able to at least monitor a larger range. Add a speaker to tell people to move out?

I can say I wouldn't be willing to take my children to more remote areas at this point. If you do please bring QuikClot/Celox and the super glue type suture stuff.

If you are visiting the upper Rocky Mountain West and doing anything mildly extreme this summer you might want to look into a life flight membership.

https://www.lifeflight.org/membership/

They kind of nixed that themselves... (of course, rules are meant to be broken)...

https://www.nps.gov/orgs/aviationprogram/upload/unmanned-air...

Was at a couple national parks this month. The chaos due to short staffing saddened me. Foolish tourists will die or be hurt, and nature will be damaged, because the monitors and first responders are not there.

What’s the plan here? I thought these were America’s Crown Jewels, monuments we could point to and be proud of?

Advice I got from a ranger:

Stay away from the large famous national parks: Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite. Go to smaller lesser known national parks as well as state parks where the visitor/staff ratio is not ruinous.

> What’s the plan here?

There's only ever been one plan and it hasn't changed:

1) cut funding to a public service

2) said service goes to shit because it lacks support

3) use chaos as an excuse to privatize it so someone makes a buck

then move on to the next service

That's the plan for every other federal service. For public land in particular there's an extra fun bonus step of selling the land to be exploited fully. Look at the Secretary of Interior's record in North Dakota.

who needs public lands in the first place?

https://time.com/7261219/patagonia-ceo-trump-shouldnt-sell-p...

It "worked" for the UK, now the cost of water keeps raising and the level of service keeps going down.

I'm sure they'll be repurposed into something profitable. Perhaps by leasing out mineral rights, or by carving out some of the choicest spots as highest-end residential real estate.

No longer will America's resources be allowed to languish now that the government is finally running like a business. We can finally focus on what really matters: ROI.

Sarcasm, or not, I hate your correct assessment in so many ugly, broken people's perspectives.

It's tricky.

On the one hand, everybody seems to agree that countries should reduce their debt.

On the other hand, everybody seems to complain as soon as costs are cut.

It's not tricky at all. When you're the richest country in the world and you have a lower than average tax rate, there is one very simple trick that gets rid of the debt problem.

But that is not what the US voted for, is it?

IIRC Trump's campaign promised lower taxes, not higher taxes.

He's raising taxes on most people. He didn't talk much about taxes. He campaigned on immigration and trans issues, mostly.

No one could have seen this coming. Why didn't anybody warn US voters at all!

I think the complaints are more to do with how it's being done.

The US budget deficit is driven by entitlements and the Trump tax cuts . It's very easy to balance the budget with small reforms to Social security and Medicaid and raising some revenue.

No, a lot of people have been tricked into thinking austerity is the only way to reduce their country's debt.

All the while billionaires gorge themselves on public money and contribute ever less to society.

What if I told you there is an amazing way to eliminate the national deficit, begin paying off our debts and reduce the taxes on the vast majority of people in this country without cutting costs indiscriminately...

Yeah real tricky, cut the budget of a department that is already underfunded that protects our public lands and does honest work serving the public, while cutting taxes on corporations and the ultra rich. Only a bootlicker would find anything tricky about this.

I, and many others, don’t agree that we need to reduce the debt.

We need to ensure it grows a bit more slowly then gdp. On average, slower in boom years, faster in recession.

> everybody seems to agree that countries should reduce their debt

The GOP’s budget proposes $2 trillion in new deficits over the next 10 years. Nobody is reducing debt. Ironically, the only deficit move to date from the Trump administration has been tax increases in the form of tariffs.

It's not tricky, because costs are _not_ being cut -- the next budget will _add_ at least $2T to the deficit.

We're cutting the NPS, USFS and BLM so that we can increase the defense budget by $150B (with a B) and send troops to the Mexican border.

Not a good trade-off at all.

The GOP plan has always been to sell the vast majority of the land to the states because in the words of officials in places like Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, it's worthless to locals as federally managed lands, and the states will sell the rights to the resources (timber/gas oil production/livestock grazing) or the land itself for revenue (that lasts a few years so it's only a temporary fix.) The end game is something like Texas where most land with any water supply is privately owned, where there are federal parks, state parks and private parks (mostly for hunting). It's a very short term state tax solution that trades open space for temporary tax revenue. They would leave the unprofitable bits of national parks to the federal government.

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/03/nx-s1-5119930/utahs-controver...

This was part of Project 2025, as well, so we knew this going into the election but that was a lot of stuff.

It's tricky. The original agreement on national forests was that the local community would lose out on having a property tax base but that the forests would create jobs/income in other ways. Then slowly the feds cut out all those income streams leaving communities hurting. We used to get money from a federal fund to pay for schools to make up for the lost property tax revenue but we no longer do.

I don't want the forests sold, hate Project 2025 and think the current admin is doing horrible, but there has been a lot bad faith on both side to get everyone so divided, with lots of promises/commitments/agreements just flat out broken by the left without a care to the impact on actual lives. My town had three mills, today it has none. Our lake management has been switched to actively destructive to the local community (changing lake levels in ways that destroy docks/marinas/prevent boat access and impact local fish spawning) in order to send water downstream for federal pet projects even though the Feds promised it would be managed like a natural lake when they put the dam in. Our lake use to be crystal clean and you could see down 20-30 feet. Now because it's more stagnant from the damn and has time to warm up you can't see down 3.

The states mentioned already have state land for state benefit, and they are managed as a resource and don't provide the type of nature that the national forests do with hunting, wheeling, camping recreation. They are heavily logged. They used to lease the land but now just sell it off and get one payday.

Again I hate project 2025 but the left tore up Federal agreements with local communities like Trump is doing now and no one cared because it only ruined loggers/miners/logging truckers/mill workers' lives and 'was for a good reason' (created a logging ban for all practical purposes) or destroyed lakes they were willing to sacrifice for their pet projects lower down the watershed.

> What's the plan here?

The plan is to sell off the Crown Jewels to fund Trump's sovereign wealth fund.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trump-quietly-plans...

As countless comments have pointed out, the "savings" here are insignificant. The purpose is to hurt the US, "to put [the state] in trauma".

That part is working. As planned.

One little ray of hope though. Project 2025 & Russell Vought are getting the trauma and suffering. But they aren't getting the key component that their plan was built on:

> When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

I don't think anyone is falling for this. I don't think the callous chainsaw-wielding cavalcade of wanton destruction is solidifying the GOP anti-government hate machine stance across America. Its not cool, it's not making the good people doing hard work for America look like villains. The Project 2025 deconstructionists are the minority here.

Thanks Empty Wheel for this key reminder. https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/02/28/russ-vought-got-his-tr...

Trump’s visits to the Super Bowl and the Indie 500 alone cost the tax payers more than was saved by cuts to the national parks staffing.

People’s lives, homes, families.

Folks who have dedicated their lives to enabling their fellow citizens to experience the grandeur of our nation’s natural beauty.

For a photo op.

All of the salaries together don't add up to anywhere near their supposed budget cut. It's not about saving money or efficiency. It's about harassing government employees.

And as far as I can tell, that is what the voters who chose him want. Maybe they'll change their mind if some service (like national parks) starts to fail for them specifically, but until then they seem thrilled that the right people are being harmed.

The cruelty is the point.

> Long queues of cars were stuck outside Grand Canyon National Park over President's Day weekend, one day after the mass firing, due to a lack of toll operators to check people in at the gate.

I was there over Presidents Day weekend. The first day I went in (around 3pm) there was zero wait. The second day I went (around 10am), I had to wait 10 minutes. All the booths seemed open. I didn't find this matched up with my experience at all.

》 team typically carry 600lbs (270kg) of litter on their backs out

Big part of recent increase in expenses is thanks to dog owners, and damage they do to environment. Post-covid everyone now owns a dog, and leaves bags of poop hanging from tree branches, like some sort of perverted Christmas tree

Banning dogs from all national parks, would solve all financial issues!!!

Destroy every agency and privatize them.

5% of National Park Service staff was cut. 10% of US Forest Service. That doesn't seem excessive.

It is if they were understaffed already.

Try doing that to a business, and see what happens. Unless your business has real fat, you will watch it circle the drain and die.

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