Testimony: Public Witness Day on FY27 Appropriations

Chairman Simpson, Ranking Member Pingree and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony on behalf of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). Founded in 1919, NPCA is the leading national, independent voice for protecting and enhancing America’s National Park System for present and future generations. We appreciate the opportunity to provide our views regarding the National Park Service (NPS) FY27 budget, and to outline our deep concerns with the administration’s actions undermining NPS’ ability to meet its mission. We appreciate the FY26 conferenced bill’s oversight and response to these actions and request you build on this oversight in FY27.

Please maintain funding for the Operation of the National Park System (ONPS) with a modest increase to $3 billion in FY27.

ONPS provides critical funding for personnel and other operational needs. It is the core funding that allows national parks and their supporting offices to meet NPS’ mission to protect world-class cultural and natural resources and ensure visitor safety and enjoyment. This level is a modest increase of $122.8 million over FY26 to account for some fixed costs.

Unfortunately, because appropriations for ONPS have not kept up with fixed costs, NPS lost more than 2,000 permanent staff between 2011 and 2024—a loss of 11%. This challenge was compounded by a 19% increase in visitation during that same period. As a result, staff were performing multiple collateral duties, with resource experts and maintenance crews helping manage surging visitation, a great deal of work not getting done, visitor programs declining, and the maintenance and repairs backlog growing. Congress must reverse the trend of staff losses. However, increased appropriations will have limited impact if the administration does not end its many actions undermining NPS staffing and the fundamental ability of NPS to perform its duties as Congress intended. Since the administration took office, NPS has lost more than 4,000 permanent staff, a decline of 24% on top of the losses outlined above.

Restore staffing levels to FY24 levels.

We are alarmed at the administration’s continuing multi-pronged attack on NPS staff and failure to completely end the hiring freeze. We commend you for providing FY26 bill and report language mandating that the NPS has sufficient staff to meet its mission, that appropriators be given notice and the opportunity to approve reorganization plans or Reductions in Force (RIFs), reporting requirements on staffing levels, and other oversight mechanisms seeking to maintain staffing levels and provide necessary oversight. We ask you to build on these commendable actions by adding statutorily binding bill language specifying hiring, rehiring and retaining staff at the FY24 staffing levels. Our ONPS request should be sufficient funding.

The FY26 funds you provided should be sufficient to restore staffing levels to nearly what they were prior to last year’s unprecedented loss of more than 4,000 permanent staff that left the park service due to firings, resignations and early retirements under pressure in a climate of tremendous uncertainty, as well as misguided and chaotic consolidation into the Department of the Interior (DOI). Despite your commendable investment and associated bill and report language, NPS has not been rehiring staff to prior levels. In testimony to the Senate Interior appropriations subcommittee this week, DOI Secretary Burgum indicated that 5,500 temporary staff are in the process of being hired—a number in line with past summers—and 593 permanent positions are in the process of being filled. However, this is approximately less than a fifth of permanent staff that could be filled with the appropriation that your committee provided.

DOI also recently initiated yet another Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), which has threatened the loss of even more staff after a devastating year. Sec. Burgum has emphasized that these were voluntary departures. However, through the administration’s public statements, a series of Executive and Secretarial Orders, OMB and OPM memos, and other actions—as well as the threat of a RIF—the administration has made it clear these staff are not valued and their jobs are not secure. This is not voluntary but, rather, is coerced—and we urge you to view it as such. This pattern must end, and you have the ability to ensure that happens.

Current staffing challenges in NPS units include approximately 60 vacancies in Acadia National Park, including management and budget support, air and water quality specialists, water system operators, preventative search and rescue staff and more; a loss of a third of the staff at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park; 20% fewer staff at Dinosaur National Monument; and no project manager, a lack of biologists and ecologists, and reduced rangers and interpretive staffing levels at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. These are just a few current examples.

Restore transparency and provide robust oversight of NPS spending

We also appreciated in the conferenced FY26 bill the specified funding for specific subactivities and otherwise mandated funding for certain accounts by reference to the Explanatory Statement. We encourage you to build on this effort as you oversee obligation of FY26 appropriations. Simply put, we have seen this administration hide, delay, misuse, and try to reprogram funds and otherwise evade appropriators’ intentions to conserve, protect and staff our national parks, so we know how important these efforts are. We were relieved to see your support for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Great American Outdoors Act’s (GAOA) Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF) in this regard and ask that this language be extended and modified and improved upon if needed. We ask you to ensure that all project lists be provided in timely fashion so that both Congress and the American public can see where these investments are going.

Prohibit RIFs at NPS and reverse the chaotic and unnecessary NPS reorganization effort

Our estimate is that more than 1,600 NPS staff have been consolidated into DOI. The process has been chaotic, unnecessary, and counterproductive to its stated goal of efficiency. It has caused confusion for superintendents who no longer have staff as direct reports to do essential work in communications, IT, HR, budgeting and other services. Consolidated staff fear that they will be targeted in a RIF. Communications staff cannot act swiftly to inform the public about developments in parks, having to go through a burdensome and bureaucratic chain of command to get permission from the Secretary’s office for what should be routine actions. Superintendents’ budgets have been reduced as their funds for consolidated staff are transferred to DOI along with questionable overhead costs that are taken from them. Rescue and medical incidents are threatened to be compromised by consolidating IT staff who maintain communications, dispatching and other needed hardware. Furthermore, in a recent response to a Freedom of Information Act request to PEER, DOI could not demonstrate any cost savings to taxpayers or costs to individual bureaus. It had no written records that any significant efficiencies had been achieved. The effort has been massively disruptive, irresponsible, and ineffective.

After NPS has lost more than 24% of its staff in the last year, a RIF would only cause further damage. Despite Sec. Burgum’s recent statements that there are no plans for a RIF, we urge bill language preventing any NPS RIFs in FY27. We also respectfully request language that halts and reverses the disorderly reorganization. We immensely appreciate the conferenced FY26 bill’s efforts to ensure reporting and approval of any RIF or reorganization plans and urge that this language be strengthened in the FY27 bill to stop DOI from engaging in these damaging actions.

We are particularly concerned about Sec. Burgum’s undervaluing of NPS supporting offices. The work that these supporting office staff do is central to the protection of the resources in the parks themselves. Many parks have little resource protection capacity, and the supporting staff work directly with those parks to ensure work is done to meet the many mandates Congress has provided to protect park resources. This is in essence an efficient and cost-effective arrangement, when staff are shared across many parks to directly support resource protection and visitors.

The experts who work in NPS’ support offices are critical to inventory and monitor resources to inform management that protects the health of visitors, staff and wildlife and ensures the long-term protection of both natural and cultural resources. Eliminating expertise within regional and service-wide key programs including Inventory and Monitoring Networks, air quality monitoring, historic preservation, and archaeological services would severely undermine park integrity and long-term resource management. NPCA’s recent issue of Science News outlines some of the now vacant natural resource positions and the impact that is having.

We also encourage you to include statutorily binding language preventing DOI from further delaying and halting grants and cancelling building leases. We appreciate efforts in FY26 in this regard and ask you to build on this effort with bill language to this effect. For additional information on the deeply damaging impact that DOI’s actions have had on NPS, we encourage you to review our FY26 Senate Outside Witness Testimony.

Additional oversight we request you consider:

• Mandate in the bill that DOI provide a summary of workforce numbers by park, region, and program including any diminished capacity as a result of administration’s actions.
• Mandate that DOI report on the impact of these actions on the ability of NPS to meet its legal obligations, including the Organic Act of 1916 and the National Parks Omnibus Management Act of 1998 that requires regular scientific assessment of NPS resources.
• Specify appropriations for inventory and monitoring and other key expertise for natural and cultural resources including regional fire, natural resource and historic resource staff.

We urge you to largely oppose the president’s FY27 budget and instead continue the targeted investments Congress has made in FY26 and through GAOA

The president’s NPS budget is extraordinarily damaging and, if enacted, would likely be the largest cut in NPS history, with a loss of nearly a third of the NPS budget. Most disturbing is the proposal to slash $736 million from the ONPS budget, which would make it impossible for NPS to meet its mission to protect and preserve irreplaceable historic, cultural and natural resources.

We oppose the drastic 45% cut to NPS Construction, which undermines the bipartisan investment in the deferred maintenance backlog that Congress has demonstrated in recent years. This account has fallen precipitously in recent years, from $389.3 million in FY20 to only $88.4 million today. GAOA’s LRF has successfully addressed hundreds of repair and reconstruction projects throughout the country, demonstrating the value and return on investment when NPS has the resources needed to maintain our treasures. However, the LRF was never intended to replace appropriations and even an extension of the LRF will not be sufficient to bring back the entirety of the backlog. We therefore encourage you to reject the proposal to cut this account further and instead begin restoring it to prior year levels.

The one thing we commend in the president’s budget is the support for extending the LRF for another five years. We applaud the Senate’s America the Beautiful Act and look forward to a bipartisan House bill that can significantly address the deferred maintenance backlog and urge members of this committee to support that effort. Conversely, we are skeptical of the requested $10 billion Presidential Capital Stewardship Program within NPS. The maintenance backlog for NPS sites in Washington DC is $2 billion, which raises important questions about where the remaining funds would go and if new construction is necessary when there is a $23 billion backlog throughout the country that would not be fully addressed with another infusion of LRF funds. The proposal is scarce in detail, and we encourage you to consider assigning any funds of this magnitude appropriately to ensure NPS can address needed maintenance and repairs at the diversity of park sites that need them.

The president’s budget also proposes eviscerating the budgets of the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF) and National Recreation and Preservation accounts. Both these accounts provide for grants and community support to protect and interpret valuable and popular historic sites and community-driven recreational resources and public access. These programs and grants—ranging from Save Americas Treasures grants to National Heritage Areas (NHAs) to the Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance program—are popular in communities of all demographics and deserve this subcommittee’s continued support. We commend the FY26 bill’s specification that every NHA receives the funding it needs and that the Tribal Historic Preservation Offices receive their fair share of HPF dollars; we encourage this be repeated in FY27.

We continue to strongly oppose any efforts to transfer NPS sites to states or other entities as the administration has proposed. We outline our alarm at this proposal in both our FY26 Senate testimony and in our May 2025 press statement on this effort. For more information on the NPS staffing crisis, see NPCA’s press releases since January 2025.

Thank you for considering our views.