Cuts to US national parks and forests met with backlash

BLM is huge, remote and hard to regulate. Wouldn't that already be happening if it was easy to do at scale?

I asked the ranger at the gate of one NP if there is a closing time for the park and he laughed and said the park is open 24 hours. One campground in the park was full on reserve'murica and nearly empty when I drove by it.

Why drive out of the park to find BLM when I could just stay there in the park? So, I used google maps and found a little side road at the end of a trail parking lot, where you had to drive up a curb and through a gate (which was open)... drove down about a mile out of sight and parked.

Most people are in big RV's and need hookups or sleep in tents, so they shouldn't do this. I'm totally off grid, LNT, and self-sufficient for weeks at a time. Not bothering anyone or over staying my time there. I actually wouldn't mind seeing more people do it this way.

Yes, the stars are beyond amazing at night.

latchkey, I don't know why your reply is straight [dead]. You're just describing the apparent dynamic these days, to the extent it's indicative of overall decay that's not on you. Whenever I got called out by rangers, I would invariably be directed to a campsite. There was always room. Obviously before this reserve'murica dynamic that apparently makes campsites something like concert tickets or NYC restaurant tables.

The times I would try to sleep rougher in my car was when I was coming from FS/BLM land where it's more of a free for all, I got in late, and wasn't planning on staying at the NP very long.

Eventually I got used to the idea that the Parks have much more stringent rules and controls precisely because they are designated parks. You're not in some raw state of being in nature, but rather more like a highly-trafficked museum - they built roads and put a dot on the map attracting throngs of humans that need to be managed.

My and your reply got killed. Interesting moderation going on here @dang.

They kind of nixed that themselves... (of course, rules are meant to be broken)...

https://www.nps.gov/orgs/aviationprogram/upload/unmanned-air...

It's tricky. The original agreement on national forests was that the local community would lose out on having a property tax base but that the forests would create jobs/income in other ways. Then slowly the feds cut out all those income streams leaving communities hurting. We used to get money from a federal fund to pay for schools to make up for the lost property tax revenue but we no longer do.

I don't want the forests sold, hate Project 2025 and think the current admin is doing horrible, but there has been a lot bad faith on both side to get everyone so divided, with lots of promises/commitments/agreements just flat out broken by the left without a care to the impact on actual lives. My town had three mills, today it has none. Our lake management has been switched to actively destructive to the local community (changing lake levels in ways that destroy docks/marinas/prevent boat access and impact local fish spawning) in order to send water downstream for federal pet projects even though the Feds promised it would be managed like a natural lake when they put the dam in. Our lake use to be crystal clean and you could see down 20-30 feet. Now because it's more stagnant from the damn and has time to warm up you can't see down 3.

The states mentioned already have state land for state benefit, and they are managed as a resource and don't provide the type of nature that the national forests do with hunting, wheeling, camping recreation. They are heavily logged. They used to lease the land but now just sell it off and get one payday.

Again I hate project 2025 but the left tore up Federal agreements with local communities like Trump is doing now and no one cared because it only ruined loggers/miners/logging truckers/mill workers' lives and 'was for a good reason' (created a logging ban for all practical purposes) or destroyed lakes they were willing to sacrifice for their pet projects lower down the watershed.

That's the plan for every other federal service. For public land in particular there's an extra fun bonus step of selling the land to be exploited fully. Look at the Secretary of Interior's record in North Dakota.

who needs public lands in the first place?

https://time.com/7261219/patagonia-ceo-trump-shouldnt-sell-p...

It "worked" for the UK, now the cost of water keeps raising and the level of service keeps going down.

Sarcasm, or not, I hate your correct assessment in so many ugly, broken people's perspectives.

It's not tricky at all. When you're the richest country in the world and you have a lower than average tax rate, there is one very simple trick that gets rid of the debt problem.

What if I told you there is an amazing way to eliminate the national deficit, begin paying off our debts and reduce the taxes on the vast majority of people in this country without cutting costs indiscriminately...

I, and many others, don’t agree that we need to reduce the debt.

We need to ensure it grows a bit more slowly then gdp. On average, slower in boom years, faster in recession.

No, a lot of people have been tricked into thinking austerity is the only way to reduce their country's debt.

All the while billionaires gorge themselves on public money and contribute ever less to society.

> everybody seems to agree that countries should reduce their debt

The GOP’s budget proposes $2 trillion in new deficits over the next 10 years. Nobody is reducing debt. Ironically, the only deficit move to date from the Trump administration has been tax increases in the form of tariffs.

It's not tricky, because costs are _not_ being cut -- the next budget will _add_ at least $2T to the deficit.

We're cutting the NPS, USFS and BLM so that we can increase the defense budget by $150B (with a B) and send troops to the Mexican border.

Not a good trade-off at all.

Yeah real tricky, cut the budget of a department that is already underfunded that protects our public lands and does honest work serving the public, while cutting taxes on corporations and the ultra rich. Only a bootlicker would find anything tricky about this.

I think the complaints are more to do with how it's being done.

The cruelty is the point.