How shocking. The Trump administration’s PR-driven plan to keep national parks kinda sorta open during a government shutdown hasn’t been fully planned or even thought through at the most basic level.
Officials from three sites said Thursday they were unsure how to proceed.
“We don’t have a plan yet,” said Abby Wines, spokeswoman for Death Valley National Park in California, which is seeing 80,000 visitors a month. “We just got a memo about this yesterday. Today’s the first day we’re seriously thinking about this.” [...]
Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, said in an email that “the vague direction” superintendents are receiving from headquarters puts them “in an impossible situation.”
“They’ll be forced to make on-the-fly decisions about what areas of national parks warrant protection. And then they’ll need to determine how to protect those places with virtually no staff,” she said, adding that the policy “raises some serious questions not only about what resources get protected, but also the legality of this partial closure scenario.”
But the important thing is that Trump not be blamed when people get turned away at the barricaded entries to national parks. Much better that visitors and parks alike be endangered by “open” but drastically understaffed parks, as long as the problems aren’t easy for news organizations to photograph.
Remember all those Republicans who insisted that national parks were closed during the last government shutdown because then-President Barack Obama was trying to make Republicans look bad? Supposedly shutting things down during a government shutdown was some vicious partisan jujitsu. Well, this is what it looks like when they try to do the reverse—keep parks open during a likely shutdown. It turns out it’s not so easy to safely run huge swaths of land without staff, and the political agenda in keeping the parks open without a plan for safety becomes suuuuper obvious.