America has much to be proud of in the 250th year since its founding, but the condition of its national parks shouldn’t be on the list. The national park system faces a maintenance backlog of $24 billion in crumbling roads, aging water systems, washed-out trails and dilapidated visitor facilities. That is more than seven times the National Park Service’s annual budget.
Congress wants to help. Last month, committees in both the House and Senate advanced bipartisan bills to dedicate roughly $1.3 billion annually for park maintenance over the next five years.
Paying down the backlog is important. But Congress needs to do more than fix overdue repairs. It should tackle the root of the problem: a lack of funding for the routine work that keeps parks from deteriorating in the first place.
Consider what happened the last time Congress provided funds for maintenance.
In 2020, the Great American Outdoors Act sent the Park Service a similar amount of funding as this year’s bills — roughly $6.5 billion in total over five years — to finance a backlog estimated at $15 billion.
The legislation didn’t fix the problem; The backlog has since grown by $9 billion.
Part of that increase reflects accounting issues. The Park Service found work orders it had previously ignored and revised estimates for other repairs upward.
But it also reflects a perverse incentive Congress created. Parks get special funding once they fall into disrepair, rewarding the neglect of day-to-day maintenance and operations.
I have seen this issue up close. As a former backcountry ranger in the Park Service, I watched visitors overrun popular areas while the agency fell behind on basic upkeep.
A decade ago, I testified before Congress that the federal government had its priorities backward. It provided ample funding to acquire new federal land while largely ignoring the care of the land the government already owns.
This still happens today. The Great American Outdoors Act provided temporary funding for park maintenance, available only after assets had fallen into disrepair. But the same legislation guaranteed $900 million annually, in perpetuity, for the Land and Water Conservation Fund — the main federal fund for acquiring new land.
Congress had previously provided the LWCF with less than $400 million a year on average. Now the money flows automatically.
Congress has created a permanent land-acquisition fund that is larger than ever, while offering only temporary funding for deferred maintenance.
Neither fund addresses routine care — the ordinary, unglamorous work that keeps a roof from leaking or a water line from bursting. When that is skipped year after year, small repairs turn into big ones, and a job that might have cost a few thousand dollars ends up costing several million. A $24 billion repair backlog is the disastrous result.
Another temporary fund won’t solve the core problem. Congress needs to scrap or reform its land-acquisition funds and use those dollars each year to maintain the public land America already owns. Without that shift, parks will keep deteriorating, and Congress will keep having to bail them out.
Parks need more reliable funding, and the obvious source is the visitors themselves. The Park Service records more than 300 million visits to national parks each year, yet it costs remarkably little to enter. At the busiest parks, the standard week-long pass is $35 per vehicle. For a family of four, that is less than $10 per person.
