A former National Park Service director is warning that the Trump administration could be laying the groundwork for privatizing parks.
Jon Jarvis, who served as director of the agency during the Obama administration, said in an op-ed article in The Guardian on Monday that President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash park staff through early retirements and layoffs — as well as a recent proposal to hollow out the agency’s budget — are a “great harm” intended to cripple parks’ ability to provide services. The article was co-written with Gary Machlis, who served as science adviser to the NPS director during the Obama administration.
“The administration will claim the private sector can better run (read ‘exploit’) the parks that the administration purposely set up to fail,” they wrote.
Jarvis and Machlis argue that the Trump administration will first try to put high-revenue parks into private hands as a pilot program before moving to wider divestment of park units.
