This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 29 episode of “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”
Last week, the public learned the Trump administration reportedly has been quietly working out how to hand a piece of Yosemite National Park — one of America’s great national treasures — to a private developer.
The news site NOTUS first reported the story, citing internal agency documents and several people directly involved in the discussions. NOTUS reported that the proposal is backed by “the full weight of the Interior Department’s top political leadership,” and that the process has created a tense environment inside the Park Service.
According to this apparent deal, in exchange for the swath of land in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, the developer would purchase land of equivalent value and hand it over to the government. The National Park Service told NOTUS that no final decision has been made yet.
But Yosemite is just one park in a much bigger war on public lands being waged by this administration.
An analysis from the Center for American Progress found that in his second term alone, President Donald Trump has moved to strip protections from more than 86 million acres of American public land — an area the group compared to more than 70 Grand Canyons.
For more than a century, America’s parks have rested on a founding promise: a law called the National Park Service Organic Act. Congress passed it in 1916 and created the Park Service to conserve scenery, wildlife and historic objects across the country. Its mandate is to leave these places “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
But that promise is now under threat as this administration removes protections for public lands nationwide.
One of the places under threat is a 7-mile stretch of road in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, an area where traffic stops for grizzly bears. In California, what’s on the table is a piece of the park itself. In Wyoming, it’s a project the government already studied more than a decade ago — and already rejected.
It’s called the Moose-Wilson Road, and it runs through 10,000 acres of habitat for all sorts of animals, including grizzlies, wolves, moose, elk and migratory birds. Underneath this corridor are precious archaeological sites marking thousands of years of Indigenous presence.
Ten years ago, the NPS spent three years studying what to do with that road. Public meetings were held and several alternatives were proposed. One of those proposals included paving a bike pathway along that road.
In response, tens of thousands of public comments flooded the agency, with most opposing the idea. In the end, the park service signed what’s called a “Record of Decision” that outright rejected the proposal in 2016.
In the government’s own words, building the bike pathway would cause “significant net increases in wildlife habitat disturbance and fragmentation” and “adverse impacts on a major archaeological site.”
Those were factual findings based in science. But this month, the Trump administration decided that the science and the Indigenous ties to the land don’t matter all that much. It ordered the NPS to amend the 2016 decision and authorize the bike pathway, or what it calls a “multiuse pathway.”
But if the science didn’t change, what did?
Well, what changed came from Washington. In July of last year, Trump signed an executive order titled “Making America Beautiful Again by Improving Our National Parks.” It’s largely about charging foreign tourists more at the gate, but it also directs the interior secretary to go back through the department’s rules and rescind any that “unnecessarily restrict recreation in national parks.”
Here’s the thing, though: An executive order has no power to repeal statutes that are already on the books. In fact, the order says so itself, noting in its own text that it must be carried out “consistent with applicable law.”
That “applicable law” still includes the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to study the environmental consequences of what it’s about to do before it does it, and to go back and study it again when it substantially changes the plan.
It still includes the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires the government to identify historic sites, consult the tribes connected to that land and avoid harm before digging.
And now, the people who know the park service best, the agency charged with carrying out these laws, are sounding the alarm. The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, whose membership includes more than 5,000 retired, former and current park service employees, filed formal comments in July.
Along with pointing to these laws, they flagged what the government is floating as so-called mitigation: surveying the sites, documenting them and archiving that documentation. In the group’s words, all that would do is “document destruction of a historic landscape and prehistoric archeological sites for the purposes of building and constructing a pathway for a comparatively small number of persons.”
Here’s the part that should worry people most: You can always rewrite a rule — and the next administration can come in and undo it, of course — but it is much harder to undo a deed or unpave a wetland or unbulldoze a site that holds thousands of years of Indigenous history.
Allison Detzel contributed.
