The Trump administration wants states to take over the management of America’s national parks – something never before proposed by a U.S. president.
In its budget request for the fiscal year 2026, which is also proposing billions in crippling cuts to space, health, education, and other areas, the White House argued that the The National Park Service’s responsibilities “include a large number of sites that are not ‘national parks,’ in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as state-level parks.”
