President Donald Trump’s spending plan proposes an $18 billion fund to help rebuild national parks and wildlife refuges and boost the Native American education system but also would deliver a severe cut to the Interior Department’s overall budget and add new authority to sell off some public lands.
Trump’s budget blueprint outlines a new program to raise money from oil and gas royalties and other federal revenue sources to tackle the maintenance backlog for national parks and other federal lands. That to-do list now stretches to $11.6 billion, and the administration proposes tackling it as part of its new initiative to rebuild crumbling roads, bridges, waterways and other public projects.
“We need to rebuild our parks,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told reporters. “Our parks are being loved to death.”