Why should the National Park Service be funding so many sites? And what would happen if some of those properties were transferred to state or tribal management?
The Trump administration is asking those sensible questions, and is proposing to cut $1.2 billion from the agency's budget, "mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management" per Bloomberg. This is a pet issue of mine: It's always been unclear to me why we expect taxpayers across the country to pay for the upkeep and management of so many designated sites, including ones they will never visit and have never heard of. Do you really need to be paying for New York City's Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site? Or North Dakota's Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site?
I say this as a nature and history appreciator. My interest is not in having these places razed; it's in making sure the federal government is careful about where its money goes and what's actually in the national interest.
