From the majestic canyons of the Grand Canyon to the granite peaks of Yosemite National Park to the ancient trees of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, President Donald Trump has promised to make America’s federal preserves “beautiful again.”
National parks make up part of more than 600 million acres (243 million hectares) of U.S. public lands spanning forests, deserts, waterways, and wildlife refuges.
“These lands include some of the most ecologically pristine and biodiverse lands in the country,” said Jenny Roland Shea, director of public lands policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank.
But critics say these landscapes are threatened by deep budget cuts and environmental setbacks that make room for resource extraction.
For example, in May 2025, the Trump administration proposed cutting nearly $1 billion (860 million euros) from the National Park Service’s budget, a cut that park advocates warned could force hundreds of facilities to close or significantly reduce services.
For Roland Shea, “undermining the National Park Service and its conservation mission under the guise of ‘making government more efficient’ has only made parks and public lands ever less safe, clean, accessible, and overcrowded.”
In April 2025, President Trump signs an order repealing environmental and climate regulations that limit coal and energy production on federal lands. Image: Andrew Thomas/NurPhoto/picture Alliance
Two months after announcing the cuts, President Trump signed an executive order specifically focused on “improving” national parks. While lyrically evoking natural areas that have “inspired generations,” he also criticized “land use restrictions” that have “deprived hunters, fishermen, hikers, and outdoor enthusiasts of access to the public lands they own.”
But there are concerns that by casting conservation measures as obstacles, Trump is waving the flag for a larger policy shift that would open more federally managed land to mining, drilling and logging.
National parks remain highly popular
Known for preserving iconic landscapes, this national park network is sometimes called “America’s greatest idea.” In 2024, parks alone set a record with approximately 332 million visitors spending approximately $29 billion in nearby communities.
A November 2025 YouGov poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans (69%) oppose the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the National Park Service.
This came before the Senate in January, where a bipartisan budget bill rejected these cuts. Still, park advocates warned that national parks have become vulnerable to the possibility of being sold off since language ensuring they remain public land was removed from the bill.
“Protecting our national parks is a bipartisan issue,” Theresa Pierno, then president of the National Park Conservation Association (NPCA), which commissioned the study, said in a statement. “No one recklessly called for layoffs in our parks or the destruction of our shared heritage. No one wants this.”
Millions of hectares opened to mining and logging
More than 40% of the total public lands in the United States have long been subject to oil, gas, coal, and mineral extraction, including so-called federal mineral lands, which produce 15% and 9% of the nation’s oil and gas, respectively.
But President Trump is now focused on “unlocking” more of America’s energy on public lands by rolling back “ideologically motivated” regulations, including environmental and climate laws, as he said in a January 2025 executive order. This includes a proposal to repeal the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which the Biden administration enacted to evenly balance resource extraction and conservation on these lands.
“President Trump’s actions are primarily aimed at weakening protections,” Roland Shea told DW. “The value of public lands is determined by their resource extraction potential and market value.”
Citing the need to reduce “foreign dependence” on critical minerals, the Trump administration in March 2025 ordered a significant increase in domestic “mineral production” on federal lands. Vast areas have been identified for rapid mining leases of “critical minerals” such as copper, uranium and gold.
The administration also opened millions of acres of public land and water to oil drilling and coal mining to “secure reliable energy,” while overturning rules that prohibited logging and road construction to enable “responsible” timber production and “fire prevention.”
Conserved public lands important to “endangered wildlife”
And that’s nothing new. Back in 2017, during President Trump’s first term, Stephen Nash, an environmental researcher at the University of Richmond in Virginia, described how his administration quickly removed millions of acres from protected public lands and made them available for logging and mining.
These included the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments and a vast canyon complex in southern Utah, which was overturned by the Biden administration. Oil and gas leases on public lands also tripled in less than a year.
In President Trump’s second term, Nash said that while landmark national parks are likely safe from large-scale mining projects, he worries that “a larger portfolio of public lands,” including national forests and wildlife refuges, could be severely degraded.
“These other public lands are even more important as wildlife habitat, which is rapidly disappearing,” Nash told DW, explaining that thousands of plant and animal species will need these lands as they migrate away from the extreme temperatures associated with global warming.
Reintroduced bison are helping restore Yellowstone National Park’s ecosystem Image: IMAGO
For example, scientists are looking at how reintroducing once-endangered American bison to national parks like Yellowstone is helping ecosystems recover. And until recently, such parks also helped educate users about the effects of climate change on the natural environment.
But following the removal of the word “climate” from government websites, the Trump administration in February forced park officials to remove or censor exhibits that share scientific knowledge about climate change.
Instead, the administration remains focused on “responsible forest management,” or “removing obstacles” to what conservationists like Nash call “instant exploitation.”
“The only natural resources they value are the ones they can extract and sell,” he says.
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