The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

https://www.terragalleria.com/blog/national-park-week-2025-what-were-really-up-against

Each April, National Park Week is a time to celebrate the beauty, history, and spirit of America’s public lands. But in 2025, celebration must be paired with vigilance. The threats facing our national parks and public lands aren’t just abstract — they are deliberate, coordinated, and accelerating beneath the surface. From budget cuts and purges within the National Park Service to secretive rollbacks of national monument protections, we are witnessing an unprecedented unraveling of America’s conservation legacy. This is not just about politics. It’s about the future of public lands as places held in trust for everyone. To meet this moment, the first step is to understand what’s happening — and that is the purpose of this report.

February 3, 2025. Corn Springs, Chuckwalla National Monument, California.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, among that fraction of the electorate aware of the policies outlined by Project 2025, a significant majority opposed them. While the Republican presidential candidate distanced himself from that document, saying he had nothing to do with it, by some strange coincidence, as President of the United States, his administration has been aggressively implementing many of its policies. Project 2025 is a 900-page detailed policy blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and supported by a coalition of right-wing organizations. While its ambitions are sweeping and pose a threat considerably more serious than impacts on our public lands, several elements are directly relevant to them. Those core tenets include executive power consolidation, purging the federal workforce, eliminating climate and DEI programs, deregulation and industry empowerment, and privatization of public goods.

Hollowing the National Park Service

In late March, on the sidelines of the Yosemite Conservancy meeting in Yosemite Valley celebrating the organization’s 100th anniversary, I discussed Horsetail’s Firefall (adorned with a distress flag this year) with a long-time resident of the valley. He recalled that for several years, the phenomenon was witnessed by just a few locals who casually commented on the quality of the display of the previous evening. Then groups started to show up and the event grew in popularity. The park service needed to restrict parking and traffic, as well as close off riverside areas to prevent ecological damage. The next step was requiring a reservation 24 hours a day to drive into Yosemite during late February weekends. Visitors do make a great deal of effort to witness a fleeting monument in nature. We both remembered the collective cheers that accompanied the light show and agreed that despite the adverse effects of crowding, it was great to see that people love their parks.

March 21, 2025. Out There screening in Yosemite. Photo by Gabriella Canal

Beyond anecdotes, the data shows that national parks have never been as popular. Since its founding, one of the goals of the National Park Service (NPS) has been to increase its constituency, which helps get the parks more funding and support. Therefore, every year, the NPS proudly publicizes visitation and economic impact numbers. After the momentum loss caused by the pandemic, 2024 broke the visitation record. Yet the NPS directed staff to keep quiet about it. Why?

Could it be because in early 2025, in a matter of a few weeks, the NPS lost 12% of its personnel through mass firings, hiring freezes, and induced early retirements? Two district courts subsequently ruled that the DOGE-initiated firings, indiscriminately citing underperformance despite workers having earned positive reviews, were illegal. Half were re-instated, but that first firing wave was just the beginning. The administration is eyeing a 30% payroll reduction. The Washington Post reported on leaked report mentioning workforce cuts of 25% at the Department of the Interior. Although designed to be less visible to the public by targeting regional offices rather than individual park units, they would devastate programs that support dozens of units.

The NPS was already understaffed. Before the latest cuts, in the last 15 years, NPS staff numbers have decreased by 20%, while visitation has increased by 15%. Besides surging visitation, the issues of deferred maintenance, climate impacts, and growing threats to biodiversity contribute to making the situation a crisis. Together with the staff reductions, the administration terminated leases and proposed reductions to the NPS budget, slashing funding for conservation programs, scientific research, cultural resource protection, and public engagement initiatives. Elon Musk backtracked on DOGE savings goals from $2 trillion to $150 billion. However, watchdog groups can only verify $12.6 billion in savings, which represents 0.17% of the 2025 U.S. federal budget. Countless government services have been lost for basically nothing in return. In particular, the NPS budget request for 2025 was $4.8 billion, while it estimated that park visitors generated $50.3 billion in total economic input. If it doesn’t make sense from an economic point of view to reduce an investment that pays ten-fold, maybe there are other deliberate goals in dismantling the NPS, such as a plan to “deconstruct the administrative state”.

Project 2025 views the agencies, rules, and regulations designed to protect the nation’s citizens as an obstacle. The NPS cuts eliminate institutional resistance, undermine the capacity to protect, and suppress public awareness. The NPS has long harbored a core of career professionals committed to conservation science, cultural integrity, and public service. The 2025 purges are part of a broader effort to replace mission-driven public servants with politically compliant actors. By gutting the agency, the administration is reducing its capacity to act as a steward of protected lands. This paves the way for industry to exploit weaknesses in oversight. The NPS plays a critical role in public education through its interpretive programs, exhibits, and publications. By defunding those efforts, the administration limits the public’s ability to understand what is being lost. The goal is not improved management – it is managed decline, as a prelude to corporate capture. The inevitable impact of the staff reductions is maintenance backlog, reduced park services, and degraded experience for park visitors. Impacts are already felt in dozens of locations. Yosemite National Park is closing backpacker campgrounds. Carlsbad Caverns National Park has suspended all ranger-guided tours, meaning you cannot experience an undeveloped cave (Slaughter Canyon Cave) nor see the most decorated section of Carlsbad Caverns (Kings Palace). Florissant Fossils Bed National Monument is closed two days per week.

In the long term, if the government won’t be able to provide adequate services demanded by visitors, then those services must be subcontracted to private companies – at a higher cost. Project 2025 views public lands not as ecological or cultural commons, but as underutilized real estate. Defunding the NPS effectively repositions parklands for removal from government control and “returning” them to the states. Unlike the federal government, the states have no mandate to keep parklands public. Once they are in private control, they are gone forever. The end goal is not improved management. It is managed decline, followed by corporate capture. We’re watching the deliberate hollowing out of one of the most respected public institutions in the U.S.— not to reform it, but to render it incapable of defending the lands it was created to protect.

Eviscerating National Monuments – Again

In 2017, the administration launched a sweeping “review” of 27 national monuments designated since 1996. Led by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the process was highly controversial—both for its motives and execution. The review targeted monuments for being “too large” or impeding development. It resulted in recommendations to alter the protections of several monuments. Bears Ears was reduced by 85%, and Grand Staircase by nearly half—opening millions of acres to potential mining, drilling, and grazing. Those actions sparked my work on Our National Monuments where I grew attached to those overlooked and less-traveled lands. While the widely publicized but biased “listening tour” that Zinke embarked on hardly featured the voices of environmentalists, scientists, outdoor recreationists, or Indigenous nations, the 2017 review at least included a 60-day public comment period, during which over 2.8 million Americans submitted feedback, with more than 99% favoring continued protection. Though ignored by the administration, the outpouring demonstrated massive public support for national monuments and sparked ongoing litigation and resistance.

Fast-forward eight years. It is now the administration’s second rodeo. They have learned from their first attempts, and this time they have a blueprint with Project 2025. While the 2017 process was widely criticized, it still operated under a veneer of public process. In contrast, the 2025 approach sidesteps accountability entirely, leveraging executive authority to quietly revise or rescind protections without public input. Project 2025’s core objectives include centralizing power in the executive, dismantling environmental protections, erasing climate and equity from public lands policy, and privatization.

A radical element of Project 2025 is its proposal to consolidate federal power under the presidency, reducing the independence of federal agencies and civil servants. The secretive nature of the 2025 monument review—no public comment period, no consultation, no transparency—is consistent with this move. Decisions are made top-down, bypassing norms of democratic engagement and scientific review. In February 2025, my inbox was filled with alerts from various conservation organizations about a new “review” of national monuments. When I read Order No 3418 “Unleashing American Energy” issued on Feb 4, 2025 by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with a 15-day deadline and the accompanying press release, I was surprised not to find the words “national monument” in the 7-page document. Yet, the conservation organizations had parsed it accurately when they denounced it as a renewed attack on our national monuments. Order No 3418 directs Department of the Interior (DOI) staff:

to review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands, consistent with existing law, including 54 U.S.C. 320301 and 43 U.S.C. 1714.

To the general public, those numbers do not mean anything, but it turns out that 54 U.S.C. 320301 is the law that gives U.S. presidents the power to designate national monuments.

Project 2025 calls for the gutting of environmental regulations. The quietly planned rollback of national monument protections in 2025 is a direct application of that goal—removing conservation designations that limit energy extraction, mining, grazing, and development (43 U.S.C. 1714 is the law that gives U.S. presidents the power to ban new mining and drilling). Project 2025 treats ideas of Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, biodiversity, and climate change resilience as obstacles. Many recent national monument proclamations from President Obama and President Biden were based on those ideas. Project 2025 envisions a future where government agencies become vehicles for private-sector profit, especially in energy and land use. Reducing monument protections removes barriers for oil, gas, and mining interests—many of whom are donors or allies to Project 2025 architects. It’s about freeing up public lands for private industry, a central tenet of the Project 2025 agenda.

In 2017, the list of national monuments targeted was well publicized and became the blueprint for Our National Monuments. So what are the monuments targeted this time? President Biden’s final proclamations were Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments in California. Located between Joshua Tree National Park and the Salton Sea, Chuckwalla National Monument safeguards 627,000 acres of California’s Colorado Desert, completing the largest continuous spread of protected lands in the lower 48 states, now known as the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor. The monument is almost as large as Joshua Tree National Park, but as is often the case with BLM lands, to explore it fully requires a 4WD vehicle. One of its most accessible areas is the Corn Springs area, whose photos illustrate this section. Even though, after driving a rough road, the skid plate of the Prius got loose and we needed to go back to town to find a car lift to fix it. I thought it was a smart move to establish those new parklands in a state where they enjoy wide popular and political support – as opposed to Utah where they enjoy only popular support. However, I didn’t take into account the current president’s obsession with undoing his predecessor’s legacy – even when it makes no sense whatsoever. In Mid-March, it appeared that he was poised to rescind protections for the two new California national monuments, but like the rest of the process, there was much uncertainty, backtracking, and little transparency. Earlier this week, Public Domain got the scoop that the leaked DOI 2026-2030 Strategic Plan Draft Framework includes “assess and right-size monuments” and “return heritage lands and sites to the states”, but was short on specifics. Another scoop from the Washington Post includes this:

Interior Department aides are looking at whether to scale back at least six national monuments, these individuals said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no final decisions had been made. The list, they added, includes Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante

All of this is done in the name of energy emergency, that justifies insanely compressing the once multi-year environmental review process to 28 days. However, the U.S. as the largest petroleum producer in the world and a net exporter, is pumping more crude than at any time in history. Natural gas, coal, and lithium supply far outpace demand. The real agenda isn’t about meeting urgent energy needs—it’s about seizing a political opportunity to gut environmental safeguards and privatize public resources under the guise of crisis. National monuments, many of which were designated to protect culturally and ecologically sensitive lands, are being rebranded as “obstacles” to growth. What’s being framed as necessity is, in fact, ideology: a drive to dismantle public land protections for the benefit of extractive industries and political donors.

The public may not even know it’s happening until it’s too late. This calculated opacity is a feature, not a bug: it prevents organized resistance, media coverage, or meaningful public debate. As someone who spent years photographing the national monuments, I can say with confidence: these lands are not “wasted” because they aren’t being mined or drilled. They are vital places of beauty, heritage, refuge, and scientific value. They were designated after rigorous review and with overwhelming public support. Rolling back their protections without any meaningful engagement, is a direct attack on the principle that public lands belong to the people. The tragedy here is not just the potential loss of protections. It’s the erosion of public trust in how our shared heritage is governed. When democratic processes are subverted, and transparency is replaced by executive fiat, we don’t just lose landscapes—we lose the idea that those landscapes belong to all of us.

What We Can Do

We need to be clear-eyed: this is not just about politics or partisanship. It’s about defending the future of public lands. The attacks on the National Park Service and national monuments are calculated, systemic, and designed to fly under the radar. But if they succeed, the consequences will be irreversible. Last week, Interior Secretary Burgum gave DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, a former oil executive, full control of the department’s organization and staffing, which could be interpreted as effectively putting Elon Musk’s DOGE in charge of America’s public lands. What’s needed now is vigilance and vocal resistance.

April 19, 2025. St James Park, San Jose, California.

Participate in protests. Momentum has been gathered by 50501, a grassroots movement which has mobilized millions without any budget, centralized structure, or official backing. Support citizen groups who track these developments, in particular Resistance Rangers (NPS inside voice, whistleblower culture) and the Conservation Lands Foundation (grassroots coalition builder, defender of BLM lands). Legal action will be an effective way to block policies, a focus of Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Center for Biological Diversity. Contact elected officials, using the digital tools of big legacy organizations such as NPCA and the Sierra Club, or directly via 5 Calls. Share what’s happening with those who care about nature, democracy, and equity—even if they don’t usually follow public lands policy, just like I did with you. Above all, refuse to normalize the dismantling of a century-old conservation legacy. Public lands were created because people fought for them. That fight isn’t over. It is escalating into a new, more dangerous phase. Let’s not look back on this moment with regret. Let’s meet it with resolve.