Utah senator pulls amendment that caused stir over national parks management

Congress is haggling over appropriation bills this week for federal departments like the Department of Defense and the Department of the Interior. Those bills create annual budgets, but also include a variety of language that can have significant effects as they become law.

Which is why there was some uproar this week when Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, proposed an amendment to the Interior’s 2026 appropriation bill that would strike language stipulating that all National Park Service land remain as part of the park service.

“The Department of the Interior shall maintain all federal lands designated as, or as a part of, a national park unit, a national scenic or national historic trail, or a wild and scenic river as of May 2, 2025 as federal land, and continue to operate such ... as an entity of the National Park Service,” reads Section 130 added by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Lee’s amendment would have stripped that section from the bill. But after two days of consideration and misconceptions, he removed the amendment late Thursday — allowing Collins’ language to stand — so that the bill had more time to be considered and colleagues’ concerns could be addressed.

Lee’s office said that the absolute terms of all land in the park service staying under its control is impractical for Congress and the Interior Department to do their jobs.

It would restrict the agency’s ability to implement legislation like routine land swaps between agencies that Congress — specifically the Energy and Natural Resource Committee — appraises all the time, according to the senator’s office.

“This amendment resolves an error that interfered with bills routinely considered by the (Energy and Natural Resources) Committee,” a Lee spokesperson told the Deseret News in a statement Wednesday, before deciding to pull the amendment and let the bill stand.

The Interior sent a request from the National Park Service to the Senate that asked for the section to be removed from the bill. The letter outlined more than 20 different completed and proposed land exchanges or boundary alterations — from Acadia National Park through Theodore Roosevelt National Park — that it would prohibit if included.

“The language, as currently written, lacks precision ... This ambiguity could lead to confusion about management responsibilities,” reads the National Park Service letter.

“Interior flagged that Section 130 would permanently freeze park service boundaries, blocking routine land exchanges Congress has long approved, such as past legislation returning sacred lands near Denali to the Doyon Alaska Native Corporation,” wrote a spokesperson for Lee following the decision to let Section 130 stand. “That was the concern.”

Several conservation groups, however, interpreted striking the section as part of a larger attempt to dispose of — an old legal term referring to transferring ownership or getting rid of something — public lands.

“This is a blatant and tone-deaf attack on America’s public lands. With this amendment, Mike Lee is telling President Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that even our national parks can be sold to the highest bidder,” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement. “Our parks are the legacy that we pass along to our kids and grandkids, not lines on a balance sheet.”

There is no language in the bill suggesting the Interior sell national park lands — or other public lands; Section 130 does prevent park service lands from being transferred to states. As much of the conservation community has lingering concerns over the potential for federal land to lose its protections, Lee’s amendment set off alarm bells.

Lee’s office clearly challenged the implication and reiterated Thursday that the senator “categorically oppose(s) selling national parks,” and that “selling national parks was never on the table.”

“The Department of the Interior has no authority to sell national parks, and nothing in this amendment would create such authority,” Lee’s spokesperson said Wednesday. “Sen. Lee opposes the sale of national parks.”

Though it does often make changes to boundaries and land swaps, the Interior Department cannot sell national park lands without congressional oversight.

Why were the conservationists concerned?

This past May, the White House submitted a budget request seeking to reduce the National Park Service’s funding by $900 million. The reason cited was that the service included many sites “that are not ‘national parks,’ in the traditionally understood sense ... and are better categorized and managed as state-level parks.”

The White House suggested that “there is an urgent need to ... transfer certain properties to state-level management.”

At the time, some estimates found that more than 300 properties would need to close or be transferred to different entities to cut nearly a billion dollars from the park service budget. As such, those lands could not “continue to operate ... as an entity of the National Park Service,” as the language that Collins’ added to the spending bill stipulated.

The Center for Western Priorities and the National Parks Conservation Association both suggested that the budget request and the implication that some NPS properties would be transferred to state ownership was the reason why amendment was added by Collins in the first place.

Burgum has said at several congressional hearings over the past year that public lands are America’s greatest asset. And, as the “largest balance sheet in the world,” they’re not bringing in enough of a return on the investment to American citizens. In House committee hearings, Burgum said that transferring smaller parks service units to state management was an idea that was still under consideration and had not yet been brought to any potential units or states.

Lee’s office said that any such changes have not yet come up.

Can the Interior move properties from the National Park Service?

Land swaps between land agencies are not uncommon and there are currently at least 22 such actions pending or completed this year. Many are minor in nature such as one in San Francisco. There was a land swap completed between the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service that facilitated moving the administrative offices of Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

There are also others that still require congressional action. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is working on a bill called the Chugach Alaska Land Exchange and Oil Spill Recovery Act to swap park service land with private land owned by the Chugach Alaska Corp., a Native American community-owned company with a variety of Alaskan interests.

Now that Section 130 is still in the bill for now, such considerations are going to have to be made in light of the appropriation bill’s new language or a work-around found by the Senate.

It remains that the Interior Department has no role to change the boundaries of national parks. If it were legally allowed to do so, it could remove some of Congress’ workload in terms of navigating the backlog of potential land swaps that are considered every year, but those changes still require an act of Congress.

Ultimately, however, the Senate chose not to take up the appropriations package Thursday, which included the one for the Interior. The bill did not have a chance to be fully considered, and misconceptions about the effect of the amendment existed beyond just the outspoken concerns of conservationists.

That confusion demanded more time to address any concerns and to find better terms to both protect national parks and get out of the way of the routine work of both the Energy and Natural Resources committees and the Interior.