America’s semiquincentennial is coming at a cost to the country’s national parks.
The Trump administration has teed up a pricey celebration for the country’s 250th anniversary, but the cost is apparently more than the White House can chew. To foot the bill, officials are diverting roughly $90 million away from the National Parks Service, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
All entry fees to some of the country’s most popular parks—such as Yellowstone and Yosemite—will be used to fund America 250–related projects, according to internal agency documents obtained by the Post. That includes a $1.6 million fireworks display (which costs more than five times Washington’s normal amount for a July 4 celebration) and $76 million for repairs to the capital’s monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
While the bulk of the diverted NPS funds are technically being spent on national park remediation, it will be at an incredible detriment to the rest of a nationwide system that suffers from a $24 billion funding backlog and needs money for “deferred maintenance” projects for park infrastructure repairs and improvements.
“That is not how it was designed to work,” Ed Stierli of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, told the Post. “It shouldn’t just be all at one park at the expense of the entire national park system.”
The reallocated expenditures also hint at a larger truth: that Donald Trump’s vanity projects are much more expensive than he has been telling the public. Trump had initially promised the restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would hover around $1.8 million. Last month, however, the Interior Department said it planned to pay $13.1 million to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based firm that Trump chose because they had previously worked on his golf club’s swimming pools. The NPS documents indicate that the price tag to repaint the Reflecting Pool has more than quintupled since, and now sits at $76 million.
The cost of Trump’s White House ballroom has similarly ballooned over time. Trump pledged last summer that the 90,000-square-foot ballroom wouldn’t cost more than $200 million, and that it would be entirely funded by private donations. That has not been true: By May, the price had doubled to $400 million. The price tag skyrocketed again after an armed gunman attempted to kill Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with Republican lawmakers insisting that U.S. taxpayers should devote $1 billion to security at the proposed East Wing replacement.