The large national preserver of Cypress in Florida extends north of the Everglades National Park over 729,000 marshy acres, an old forest that protects the disappearance of Florida in the process of endangered and the virgin waters of the Everglades – the source of drinking water for millions of South Floridians.
About 2.2 million people visited last year, about three times the number of the Everglades National Park, according to the National Park Servicedata. The reserve and others as are “generally the places where local populations enjoy the most,” said Neal McAliley, environmental lawyer in Carlton Fields in Miami and former environmental sidewalk of the Ministry of Justice.
The Trump administration can move away from Big Cypress and a few other national monuments, historic parks, battlefields and protected areas that are not among the 63 with the “National Park” on their behalf.
The White House isproposalTo reduce approximately $ 1.2 billion in the NPS budget, including $ 900 million in park operations, mainly by linking the sites it considers too obscure or too local to deserve federal management, transfer them to tribal states and governments. But some states with many of these sites – there are about 370 in total – warn that they cannot afford to manage them and no more staff, and that some may end up closing.
“It takes around 350 parks to fade in order to obtain $ 900 million in budgetary savings,” said Kristen Brengel, vice-president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association. “This is all, from battlefields to restorations, leisure areas, including monuments.”
The challenges are high: Big Cypress as well as the national leisure area of Delaware Water Gap, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, protect the supply of drinking water from their regions. The staff of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Park Service in North Carolina keep sand on the beaches of outdoor banks and the islands to erode. Dozens of NPS sites preserve American history, the birthplaces of Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln at the Gettysburg National Military Park and the National Memorial of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.
It is not clear that the national park system is cut, apart from the White House and certain conservative groups which say that the plan promotes federalism.
But even some Republicans who are impatient to see other federal lands developed or taken up are not necessarily enthusiastic about the idea of breaking the national park system.
The congress has long responded to members' requests to protect a historic site in their district by putting its NP in charge, which inflated the national parks system, said representative Mike Simpson, a republican of Idaho.
But Simpson warned: “Do not screw national parks because it is something that the American people will never forgive us.”
Place of birth, battlefields examined
The White House does not yet have a list of places to be unloaded, although a more detailed budget for the interior department is expected in the coming days. Questioned during a sub -coming hearing for the Senate credits on May 21, that Big Cypress and other major NPS sites can be transferred, interior secretary Doug Burgum told Bloomberg Law only that the 63 national parks of “Crown jewel” will be left alone.
Burgum has appointed some possible transfer candidates: the national historic site of the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt in New York, the national historic site of the Indian villages of Knife River in Northern Dakota and perhaps “a battlefield site somewhere”.
Only about 25,000 people stopped by Roosevelt's birthplace in Manhattan last year. About 10,800 people visited Indian villages Knife River in 2024, which put it in number 370 on the NPS 'classificationFrom 398 park units for which visits statistics are kept. The Park Service spends less than $ 2 million a year to keep each of these open sites.
The park recommends the handle with visits numbers used as a criterion.
“Anyway, whether they are well visited or not, whether people can see him themselves or watch him on television, they don't want to see them dismantled,” said Brengel. “These patterns to save a few nickels by getting rid of the parks – it's unpopular.”
The republican representative, Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, offered the Oklahoma national leisure area in Oklahoma as a candidate to transfer to the Chickasaw nation, which sold it to the federal government in 1902. The congress transformed it into Platt National Park, until it exceeds the park of the “jewel of the crown” and modifies its name in 1976.
Today, the Park Service spends about $ 4.5 million to accommodate more than 1.5 million annual visitors to Chickasaw NRA.
The Cole office said that the Chickasaw nation had not asked for the leisure area to be returned, but the governor of the nation, Bill Aoatibby, said in a statement that he was interested.
Until now, however, there are few other interests for transfers.
States are wary of taking more
Many states have long been impatient for Congress to designate their installations as sites in the national park system, as this increases tourism traffic, stimulates the economies of communities and neighboring parts of neighboring the financial burden on the management of these sites, said KK Duvivier, professor of natural resources law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
It is among the main reasons why the governments of the States of Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina and Colorado say that they oppose transfers.
New Mexico has 18 NPS sites at risk, including Valles Caldera National Preserve, one of the new additions in the region to the national parks system. All the units of the national park transferred to the State would probably end up closing, because it already finds it difficult to maintain its parks with limited funding, obsolete facilities and high personnel vacation rates, said Toby Velasquez, director of state parks.
Maryland, which does not have a “Crown Jewel” national park but which has at least 14 other NPS sites, would intervene to save them if necessary, but the federal government should continue to support them because of the tourist draw, said AJ Metcalf, spokesperson for the state of natural resources. State NPS sites have supported a total of 2,940 jobs in Maryland and generated $ 344 million in state economic benefits, he said, citing 2022 NPSdata.
“If the federal government approves these cuts, Maryland will examine all the options to obtain and manage these sites to ensure that they remain open and accessible to the public,” said Metcalf.
Will Yeatman, principal legal researcher at the Pacific Legal Foundation, who hasargued forFederal property transfers before the courts said that more than half of the western United States is under federal control. It is logical to return part of this to the United States, he said.
“In these states mainly, there is a considerable political traction for policies like this,” said Yeatman. “I know that UTAH has adopted a bill requiring the return of federal land.”
Utah tried last year to force the Interior Department to transfer 18 million acres of other federal land there, but it did not ask for the properties of the Park service, said Redge Johnson, executive director of the public policies coordination of the Governor of UTAH.
“Could we intervene?” He said. “Yes, we would like to make sure they remain solvent and operational. We are not looking for anything actively there.”
New legal questions
In some cases, the National Park Service was responsible for certain regions because residents did not trust the States to manage them.
This is what happened in Big Cypress, which became the first national reserve in 1974. Congress agreed with many southern Floridians that the wetland the size of the Rhode Island had to be protected from the state plan to build what would have beenThe largest commercial airport in the world.
The Floridians “wanted to protect him and they did not trust the state,” said McAliley. “People wanted the park service because they trusted them to manage natural qualities.”
This is still true today, said Eve Samples, executive director of the friends of the Everglades.
“Each year, those of us engaged in an environmental advocacy in Florida fight bad bills in Tallahassee, and there is not a high degree of confidence in the legislature of the State which is what is good for our public lands,” said the samples.
The governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, a republican, did not respond to requests for comments as to whether state officials discussed a possible transfer and if the state could afford it. The BIG CYPRESS 2024 budget was around $ 7.8 million.
The congress made Big Cypress a reserve, not a national park, because it wanted to allow hunting, drilling oil and gas, off -road vehicles and marshy use and other activities that are generally not authorized in national parks.
The transfer of the reserve to the State would open a multitude of legal issues, in particular how the duty of confidence of the federal government towards the tribes of the area would be managed, whether it be wild zones proposed in Big Cypress, and if the land would be given or sold to the State, said McAliley.
“If they will just give it, they would give an extremely precious asset,” he said. “Then the state must manage it. If the president tries to reduce the expenses of the fleet service, does that not assume that the state will have to pay the money? ”
“The one who approved this,” he said, “is like an approach to meat.”
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
