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After spending his presidency denying climate change, placing coal and oil industry officials in top environmental jobs, and weakening dozens of public health and wildlife rules, President Donald Trump on Tuesday reversed course and signed a historic law to pump billions of dollars into long-neglected repairs and upgrades at America’s national parks.
The measure, known as the “Great American Outdoors Act,” is the most significant new federal conservation law in 40 years, since President Jimmy Carter doubled the size of the national park system by establishing 157 million acres of new parks, wildlife refuges, scenic rivers and other wilderness areas in Alaska during his final weeks in office in 1980.
“There hasn’t been anything like this since Teddy Roosevelt, I suspect,” Trump said during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.
Environmentalists cheered, finally securing a win they have sought for more than 20 years.
“The Great American Outdoors Act is a truly historic, bipartisan conservation accomplishment that will protect wildlife habitat, expand recreational opportunities, restore public lands and waters, and create good jobs,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation.
Election year pressures were at the center of the unusual breakthrough.
Several of the chief sponsors of the bill, including Cory Gardner of Colorado, Steve Daines of Montana, Martha McSally of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine, are Republican senators in close re-election races. The White House and GOP leaders, who previously have opposed increasing the funding, saw the measure as a major accomplishment that could help Republicans win those races. Gardner and Daines personally urged Trump to embrace it, and were featured at the signing ceremony Tuesday.
During the ceremony, the president twice mispronounced the name of Yosemite National Park, calling it “Yo-se-MIGHT,” sparking ridicule on social media.
The new law makes two landmark changes.
First, it will provide $9.5 billion over the next five years to repair roads, restrooms, trails and campgrounds at America’s 419 national parks — from Yosemite to the Everglades — and at other public lands where facilities have fallen into disrepair after years of neglect and funding shortfalls.
The money would come from royalties on oil, gas, coal and renewable energy that is already being paid to the federal treasury.
Second and more enduring, the bill would guarantee $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund in perpetuity. Congress created the fund in 1964, requiring that up to $900 million a year in offshore oil revenues go to buy new park land and maintain local parks as a way for outdoor conservation and recreation to keep pace with a growing population.
Over the past 56 years, the fund has become the most important tool for preserving public land in the United States. It has helped protect 7 million acres, from Redwood National Park in California to Cape Cod National Seashore to Martin Luther King Jr.’s boyhood home site in Atlanta.
The fund helped complete the Appalachian Trail, bought out old mining claims within Alaska’s Denali National Park and expanded public lands along the Big Sur coast. It bought private tracts within some of America’s crown jewel parks — Yosemite, Yellowstone, Olympic and Grand Canyon.
The money also has funded state grants to build 40,000 swimming pools, soccer fields, baseball diamonds, playgrounds, fishing piers, jogging trails and other projects at local parks nationwide. Among those in California: new bike paths at Lake Merritt in Oakland, renovations at Pacifica’s fishing pier, public pools in Los Angeles, public trails and beaches at Lake Tahoe, land adjacent to Big Basin Redwoods and Mount Diablo state parks that would have been logged or developed, and wetlands restoration around San Francisco Bay.
But over the years, instead of providing $900 million as the law intended, Congress and numerous presidents have instead shifted more than half of the money to other uses. Trump’s original budget this year proposed just $15 million be spent on parks and public lands from the fund. The new law requires the full $900 million to be spent every year on parks.
“That’s a soccer field we’re talking about. It’s clean bathrooms we’re talking about,” said Rue Mapp, founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, a conservation group based in Oakland that works to expand diversity in the outdoors. “When we go to places and they aren’t taken care of you don’t feel welcome in those places when they are in disrepair.”
Trump has done little to preserve public lands or reduce pollution until now. He has pushed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to offshore oil drilling. He overturned a rule that prohibited using bait, such as grease-soaked doughnuts, for hunters to lure and kill grizzly bears. He cut more than 2 million acres from two national monuments in Utah ― Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante ― the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history.
He has pushed for new offshore oil drilling off the entire West Coast, including California. He weakened rules put in place by the Obama administration to raise gas mileage standards in vehicles, allowed more mercury pollution from power plants, announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and falsely claimed wind turbines cause cancer.
But with the November election just three months away, his Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, along with his daughter, Ivanka Trump and some Republicans, urged passage of the bill and held events to promote it. The new law passed in rare bipartisan fashion, clearing the Senate by a vote of 73-25 in June and the House by a vote of 310-107 with nearly all Democrats and about half of the Republicans voting in favor. At the signing ceremony Tuesday, however, Trump invited only Republicans.
