Guest Commentary written by

Mark Butler

Mark Butler is a former superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park and worked for the National Park Service for 38 years.

When reports surfaced recently that Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum spent the last year quietly working to hand over a portion of Yosemite National Park to a developer, I was angry but not surprised.

I’ve been following the Trump administration’s steady progress toward selling off our public lands to private interests. The Yosemite giveaway is the tip of the iceberg of what’s happening to America’s national parks, national forests and other public lands.

I worked for 34 years at Yosemite National Park, including serving on the park’s executive leadership team. I also worked for nearly four years as the superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park. During that period, I saw nothing like what’s happening now. Elected leaders from both parties continued what they had done for the past 100-plus years: They consistently pushed to expand protections for national parks.

That is, until Burgum entered the picture.

The Yosemite giveaway is just the latest example of this administration cutting protections, industrializing and privatizing our national parks and public lands. The White House is taking places that belong to all of us and finding ways to sell them, lease them or give them away to developers and private corporations.

It began in February 2025 with the mass firing of National Park Service employees. Rangers and land managers who keep our parks clean, help visitors and prevent wildfires were let go by the hundreds.

The park service was not the only casualty in this process. California lost more than 1,500 federal public lands-related jobs in 2025 due to staffing cuts and forced resignations. These firings were not an isolated incident. It was the first blow in an attempt to weaken our public lands and lay the groundwork for their commercialization.

Since those firings, there’s been a steady stream of rollbacks to our parks and public lands. When U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah made multiple attempts to sell millions of acres of public lands, including places that a majority of Americans love for camping, four-wheeling, hiking and more, Burgum’s staff secretly supported the proposal. The plan was ultimately scuttled after public outrage and bipartisan backlash.

Add to that the administration’s efforts to cut nearly 3 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and bulldoze through Big Bend National Park. In total, the Trump administration has taken action to remove protections from 86 million acres of public lands nationwide since January 2025. 

This is all happening while the U.S. Forest Service announced a plan to rescind the 25-year-old “Roadless Rule,” a long-established conservation measure that protects 58 million acres of forests from road construction and logging, including more than 4 million acres in California. The public has a short time to provide input on the repeal during a comment period that ends Oct. 6. 

These actions couldn’t be more out of step with the American public. In a recent California poll, 82% of surveyed voters said that protecting and preserving public lands is an important issue. This support is staggering and consistent across party lines: it includes 71% of Republicans, 81% independents and 92% of Democrats.

It turns out that there is something that unites us: our love for America’s parks and public lands.

That widespread support needs to translate into widespread action. If you’ve ever looked up in awe at Half Dome in Yosemite or hiked in one of our nation’s many national parks and forests, it is time to speak up for those places. Our congressional representatives need to hear that our national parks and public lands belong to the American people, and we don’t want to see these places handed over to developers.

After all, if it can happen to Yosemite National Park, one of the crown jewels of our National Park system, no place is safe.