Trump Is Snatching Money From America’s National Parks to Pay for His White House Vanity Projects

Donald Trump has made a lot of promises about his D.C.-area construction projects—about their quality, about how much they’ll cost, and about who’s paying for them. Most of those promises have turned out to be false, so it’s no surprise that American taxpayers are indeed footing the bill for Trump’s personal vanity. New reporting reveals where some of that money is coming from: America’s national parks.

The Atlantic has the story:

In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from national parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. ...

Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”

Cuts to the Park Service are far from the most headline-grabbing thing Trump is doing, but they’re a perfect encapsulation of the second Trump term: raiding accounts meant to serve the public to bankroll the president’s own pet projects.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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