Thousands of National Park Service projects across the country have been allowed to languish under President Donald Trump while only the handful he considers priorities have been fast-tracked, The Atlantic's Michael Scherer reported on Thursday.

Citing internal documents and interviews, Scherer wrote that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former North Dakota governor, has established a "White House priorities" docket that has advanced projects including new pavers for Lafayette Park—the seven-acre square directly north of the White House, administered by the Park Service as part of President's Park—along with the removal of a golf course fence and the gilding of equestrian statues near Memorial Bridge. By contrast, more than 1,500 projects have been delayed indefinitely, among them an archaeological survey of the Civil War-era Camp Nelson National Monument, a Union supply depot in central Kentucky where thousands of emancipated Black men enlisted in the Union army and which Trump himself proclaimed a national monument in 2018, and the building of wildfire-resistant dumpsters.

The backlog stems not only from deliberate deprioritization. Scherer added that the Department of Government Efficiency has cut staffing so severely that even routine matters now go unaddressed for lack of resources, even as the White House insists on prioritizing a $25 million helicopter replacement, landscaping near Camp David, and drones for regional law enforcement. DOGE, as the cost-cutting initiative is known, was created by executive order at the start of Trump's second term, and its reductions fell early on the Park Service, which shed roughly 1,000 permanent employees in February 2025 even as the system of more than 400 park units draws more than 300 million recreation visits a year. The strain lands on an agency already carrying a repair backlog it has pegged at more than $20 billion—one that Congress, with Trump's signature on the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act, moved to address through billions in dedicated maintenance funding and continues to shape through annual Interior spending bills.

"Trump continues to add more projects to the list—or expand projects already on it," Scherer continued. "Take, for example, the brick pavers in Lafayette Park outside the White House gates. In May, Trump said that the park renovation would be funded by 'a contribution that I made,' even though internal documentation shows public funds being used. After the Fourth of July celebrations, the NPS agreed to pay an additional $1.5 million to replace more of the brick pavers in that park. Then, in August, the president told reporters in the Oval Office that he was still deliberating on whether the brick pavers were good enough."

The president has yet to settle the question. "Now we have a big decision to make," Trump said. "Do we take the pavers that are red—you know, the red-brick pavers—and do we change them into a granite, to gray granite? They're beautiful, but they're not the original. So we're gonna have to make that decision." Scherer concluded: "The National Park Service, no doubt, will be ready to follow the president's lead if he pivots."

The Lafayette Park deliberations follow a broader pattern in which, as Alternet noted, Trump has repeatedly prioritized personal park projects and other renovations over issues like affordability that matter most to Americans—including his construction of a border wall through Big Bend National Park, the destruction of the White House's East Wing and West Wing Colonnade, and his plans to seize the Smithsonian.

Source: Alternet