Yosemite National Park in California is one of the most popular parks in the United States. Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times/Getty via Inside Climate News
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Just over a year ago, the Trump administration gutted staff across the National Park Service, triggering a series of protests around the country, a signal of the public’s deep passion for America’s “crown jewels.”
Since then, the service has been in flux. Though a federal judge required the administration to rehire much of the staff laid off in that February 2025 purge, gaping holes still exist across the agency following firings, loss of seasonal workers, buyouts, and forced retirements. The National Park Service lost 2,750 employees in the first 11 months of the second Trump administration, a 15 percent drop, according to an analysis of federal workforce data from the Office of Personnel Management by my colleague Peter Aldhous.
“One of our most beloved national parks and our state’s largest park will be scarred beyond repair.”
On top of this, a recent series of changes—from the pending appointment of a new director to the mandated elimination of certain park exhibits that discuss racism and climate change—could fundamentally reshape the future of the National Park Service, experts say.
After more than a year without an official director of the National Park Service, President Donald Trump in February nominated hospitality executive Scott Socha to head the agency, which oversees more than 85 million acres of land and water. Socha is the president of parks and resorts at Delaware North, a food, venue, and hotel management company that operates across the US and in Australia. The company provides services for several national parks, according to its website.
Many conservation groups, elected leaders, and outdoor enthusiasts have pushed back. These shifts, they say, threaten the long-term future of the parks—and rewrite the American legacy they represent.
However, Delaware North’s relationship with the service hit a major bump in 2015, when it lost a contract to operate concessions inside Yellowstone National Park, the Guardian reports. The company sued the National Park Service over costs related to the trademark rights of names and logos, and the agency eventually settled for $12 million after a yearslong court battle.
Trump’s choice of Socha falls in line with the administration’s push to privatize US public lands, and it doesn’t sit well with some advocates.
“The private park concessionaire executive, Socha, has zero experience in public service or conservation,” Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for the Save Our Parks campaign, told SFGate. “Instead, he’s made a career out of extracting maximum profit from our national parks, not protecting them, making it abundantly clear he’ll be doing the bidding of special interests and corporate interests.”
The National Parks Conservation Association, which said the new director “must reverse course on the damage that’s been done to parks and park staff over the last year,” put out a statement that reserved judgment.
“We don’t want people to feel like when they go to parks, that history is going to be edited.”
“Our national parks need strong, sensible leadership now more than ever before,” the group’s president and CEO, Theresa Pierno, said in the statement. “Given Mr. Socha’s years of experience working with the Park Service, we hope he will be that leader.”
An August investigation by the New York Times found that at least a fifth of the country’s 433 national parks had been significantly strained due to Trump-related cuts. I spoke with former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis in May about the cascading impacts the job cuts could have on the country’s public lands. Another former director, Charles F. Sams III, echoed these concerns, along with other former park staff and recreation experts, as Blaine Harden reported for ICN in January.
Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection intends to build border barriers throughout the Big Bend region of southwest Texas, which plans show will cut through part of the popular Big Bend National Park, as my colleague Martha Pskowski reported. Scientists and conservationists have condemned the project.
“One of our most beloved national parks and our state’s largest park will be scarred beyond repair,” David Keller, a noted archaeologist of the region, told ICN.
Last March, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed the Department of the Interior to ensure that exhibits, installations and signs across the national parks system do not “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” Interior is the park service’s parent agency.
A May order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum doubled down on this effort, requiring staff to report signage that catalogues negative parts of history and the environment for potential removal.
A new analysis of an internal government database reviewed by the Washington Post found that staffers have filed a number of inquiries from across the country that indicated confusion over what would fall into the category of disparaging American history, but nonetheless flagged signage discussing everything from climate impacts at Arches National Park to segregation in the South.
The Trump administration in January took down an exhibit at the President’s House historical site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall that detailed the lives of nine people enslaved by President George Washington. Intense public outcry followed. The city of Philadelphia sued. In February, a federal judge ordered the exhibit to be reinstalled as the court battle continues, PBS reports.
In her opinion brief, Senior US District Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote that the federal government does not have the power “to dissemble and disassemble historical truths.”
I reached out to the Department of the Interior to get the agency’s response to all of this. I asked about the criticism of its signage removal efforts and advocates’ concerns about Trump’s choice to lead the National Park Service. A spokesperson sent this reply right before publication: “Your story is full inaccuracies but that should come as no surprise seeing this is a far-left blog, funded by well known liberals, with an agenda to push the Green New Scam and DEI initiatives meant to divide Americans.”
Adding to the administration’s legal fights, the National Parks Conservation Association and a coalition of scientists, historians and advocates filed a federal lawsuit two weeks ago to “cease all unlawful efforts to remove up-to-date and accurate historical or scientific information from the national parks.”
“We want Americans to know that their parks actually hold this powerful history, and that parks are a place that they can…go learn that history,” David Lamfrom, the vice president of regional programs at the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “We don’t want people to feel like when they go to parks, that history is going to be edited, and it’s going to be edited by the government because the government doesn’t believe that Americans can handle or manage that truth.”
