Op-Ed: Get Politics Out of Our Parks

As both political parties trade shots amid the government shutdown, America’s national parks are caught in the crossfire. Under a new policy adopted by the Trump administration, parks have been allowed to remain open with limited staffing during the lapse in appropriations, while some Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups have called for the parks to be closed, citing risks to visitors and damage to park resources.

National parks have long played a central role in D.C. budget battles. There’s even a name for it: the Washington Monument strategy, in which popular parks are shuttered as a form of leverage in spending fights. President Clinton used the strategy effectively in the nineties. During the 2013 shutdown, the Obama administration ordered all parks to close, including operations within parks that used no federal funds, a move that some viewed as a tactic to make the shutdown as visible as possible.

This time, parks remain part of the political playbook. Some critics say that by keeping parks open, Trump is attempting to minimize the impact of the shutdown, while one Democratic House aide told Bloomberg, “To the extent that national parks are a sympathetic face of shutdown damage, we’re thinking through how to use them in our work.”

The partisan gamesmanship over our national parks should make one thing clear: it’s time to get politics out of our parks. As a former park ranger, I know how politics can pervade parks and undermine the ability of local managers to sustain and protect them. Instead of politicizing our parks, we should be looking for ways to make them less vulnerable to Washington’s budget fights and ensure that they cannot be used as pawns to advance the agenda of any administration, whether Democrat or Republican.

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