The National Park System has a budget of $2.6 billion, much of it raised by concession and attendance fees. Even if it were entirely taxpayer-funded it would represent only .00068 of every federal dollar in our $3.8 trillion budget. Nonetheless, hardball-playing White House strategists have made it the most conspicuous instrument of pain inflicted by the federal shutdown.
The Republican House has tried to fund the park system during the struggle over Obamacare funding, but without success. Even park funding offers by states have been rejected by the feds. Almost every day brings fresh examples of unnecessary annoyances and hardships visited on the public by the park service and its Interior Department superiors.
The purpose of these gratuitous crackdowns seems to be to provoke outrage against the House of Representatives. But might they not instead provoke well-justified resentment against political manipulation by the White House? That resentment will grow, it appears, when it turns out that that even within the Park Service the implementation of the shutdown gets exceptions based on partisan political clout.
Will someone please ask Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell, the former private executive from Seattle, why she is allowing her department’s most popular agency to play the shutdown goat? Surely the deployment of rangers as scolds and punishers — for the infraction of trying to use a park! — hurts the Park Service image. In its nearly 100 year existence, has the National Park System ever been exploited — day upon day — for such negative propaganda?
