When summer hits in Moab, Utah, most locals want to clear out and escape the heat. But for many foreign tourists visiting the nearby national parks, the desert is exactly what they’re looking for.
“We find that with international visitors, that’s kind of like part of the draw, is to get this full desert, Southwest experience,” said Alison Harford, who runs communications at the Moab Office of Tourism.
Sightseers from across the globe book guided tours and whitewater rafting trips. They stay in Moab’s hotels, dine at Moab’s restaurants and buy trinkets from Moab’s souvenir shops. They rent cars, hike the trails and gaze at the area’s towering monuments.
But soon, those foreign travelers will likely face higher entry fees at America’s national parks. It’s part of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on July 3 to impose higher fees on international visitors, and now a Senate bill to codify that order, led by Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana. But Senate Democrats are hesitant to get behind the effort, noting that many states and local economies rely on park tourists.
“National parks are such good ambassadors for our country,” said Sen. Angus King, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on National Parks, told NOTUS. “I’m reluctant to put up a barrier to foreign visitors coming away with a good experience in the United States.”
The push to raise fees is backed by some conservation groups, like American Conservation Coalition and the Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC. They point to overcrowding and a multibillion-dollar backlog of maintenance waiting to be done at parks around the country. And multiple countries have similar international visitor fees on their own national parks, including India and South Africa.
“This is just like one way that you can increase funding for this really big issue that is sort of creative,” said Sarah Rosa, the policy director at ACC Action. “And you’re not having to raise spending, but you’re able to just make sure that everybody who’s enjoying our national parks is just contributing in a way that makes sure that they’re protected and stewarded in the long term.”
Sen. Steve Daines, the chair of the Subcommittee on National Parks, said he thinks the Banks bill could be bipartisan. He and King have led bipartisan legislation to authorize more funding for restoration of the parks, including a reauthorization of a program from Trump’s first term.
“It’s worth considering,” Daines told NOTUS. “We’re seeing record levels of visitation at our national parks. We’re seeing record levels of international visitors, and it would be another way to help us deal to fund our parks.”
The Senate Democrats who spoke to NOTUS mostly said they had not studied the specifics of the Banks bill. But, like King, they were concerned it would deter visitors from coming to the United States or its parks, worsening a decrease in international tourism due to Trump’s tariffs. (Projections in late spring anticipated a $12 billion loss in international visitor spending in the U.S. in 2025.)
“There’s a lot of hostility toward America,” Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado said. “As a small business person, when my sales go down, when revenues go down, I don’t raise prices. I try to find ways to cut prices, make people feel that it’s still advantageous.”
PERC’s research on the potential economic effects of such a fee, which Rosa cited, backs up the claim that a small increase would not significantly decrease international tourism. Foreign visitors usually set aside large amounts of money to travel to the U.S. A $25 additional fee per international visitor would raise $330 million across all parks and would have little to no effect on demand, according to a PERC estimate from 2023.
But the larger concern for Democrats is that it would be a kind of backpedaling on Republican cuts to the National Park Service. Trump’s administration cut about 24% of the NPS workforce since taking office, and its budget request slashes about a third of total appropriations for the service, though the House Appropriations Committee is proposing a smaller cut.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat and the ranking member on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, told NOTUS he hasn’t looked closely at the Banks bill, but that he supports encouraging international tourists. He’s more worried about the current state of the National Park Service in light of those cuts.
“The real threat to the parks right now is that the Park Service is dramatically down in staffing,” Heinrich said. “And so you have people who are very senior who are doing things like cleaning toilets instead of doing the job that they were hired to do. And I’ve just never seen a hollowing out of the Park Service like this.”
Other Democrats expressed more of those same concerns.
“Obviously their policies have been hard on the parks, programs related to it, so I just want to see how this fits in,” Sen. Ron Wyden said. “Part of what they’ve been doing, you see it like on Medicaid, they vote to do the damage, and then they say, ‘Now, we’re gonna change everything.’”
Regardless of where the funding ends up, the visitor fee provision is full-steam ahead within the executive branch. Trump’s executive order already directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to increase entrance fees for nonresidents.
Banks’ office, the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service did not respond to requests for comment.
But some gateway communities — where visitors pass through on their way to national parks — are already concerned about higher fees for international visitors.
Clarinda Vail is mayor of Tusayan, Arizona, a resort town of roughly 500 residents near the south entrance to Grand Canyon National Park. Vail told NOTUS she’s worried about the visitor fee, since “100%” of Tusayan’s economy is based on Grand Canyon tourism.
“Grand Canyon and Tusayan are one community,” Vail said. “We share a zip code, we share a school. If you work for the post office, or work at our school or something like that, they all still exist because of the tourism-based economy.”
In Tusayan, they’re still fighting to get back to pre-pandemic visitor levels. Vail said foreign travelers often don’t just go to one park, but hit many in one trip. Higher fees at all of them could stack up. And she said she needs more information about how much the fees would be and when they would apply. (Neither the executive order nor the Banks bill contain a figure or more details on a fee structure.)
Vail said she sees a lot of European travelers “doing the West.”
“What might they pay if they’re going to, you know, one to 10 national parks while they’re here?” she said.