Trump Directed Millions in National Park Fees to Hire Park Police

The Trump administration is directing $26 million in national park entry fees to help dramatically expand the size of the U.S. Park Police force in the nation’s capital.

Over the last several months, the National Park Service has been on a hiring binge, adding 300 park police officers in the D.C. area, doubling the size of its Washington presence at the cost of more than $110 million. The Trump administration, which is pushing an aggressive, federally led immigration-enforcement campaign and crime crackdown in D.C., used money from last year’s reconciliation bill to pay for most of the initial expansion — but not all of it, NOTUS found.

In addition to funneling money from the reconciliation bill, the administration employed a strategy it has increasingly relied on with park recreation fees: It routed a significant amount toward Trump’s project to remake the nation’s capital.

In this case, the Office of Management and Budget ordered that $26 million from the recreation fee money should be reserved specifically for “hiring United States Park Police officers and other personnel to be stationed in Washington,” according to an OMB database.

OMB and the Department of the Interior did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has made heavy use of national park resources to fund his D.C. beautification projects in the lead up to America’s 250th birthday celebration. His administration has spent more than $100 million in taxpayer dollars through the Interior Department on D.C. projects over the last six months, restoring fountains, beautifying parks and even re-gilding four horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial, NOTUS previously reported.

A large chunk of that spending is coming from the revenue collected by the national parks: the entry fees, campground fees and other charges visitors pay for park services.

The Park Service has spent at least $90 million in recreation fees on D.C.-area projects this fiscal year, far more than any national park has received, according to federal spending data. In total, the rest of the country, including all of the national parks, received $75 million in contracts and grants from that account this year, according to the most recent data available. The use of recreation fees for D.C. beautification was first reported by The New York Times.

The $26 million for the Park Police is additional spending from the recreation fee money, and it has not been previously reported.

At least 80% of what’s earned in a national park through recreation fees stays in that park. The other 20% is put in a shared pool, which is supposed to be distributed throughout the system. That design usually benefits the parks that have very low or negligible recreation revenue, including the monuments in D.C. But it is unusual for D.C. to receive such significant sums in one year, NOTUS found from historical spending data.

The Trump administration’s effort to dramatically expand the Park Police force this year without the explicit authorization from Congress has put lawmakers in a jam on Park Service funding for next year, one House Appropriations staffer said.

The Park Service does not have the money to pay these newly hired officers after this year. Congress must authorize more than $100 million in new spending if it wants to keep the new Park Police officers in their jobs and maintain normal law enforcement spending across the rest of the park system.

“They’re sort of tying the hands of appropriators,” the staffer said, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk to the media. “We really heavily discourage agencies from using things like reconciliation and the nonregular discretionary dollars to make large-scale staffing increases because they create this cliff.”

The Park Police is not responsible for all security across the national parks. Instead, the force handles law enforcement at the D.C. memorials, federal monuments in New York City and the Presidio and Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. The United States Park Police Fraternal Order of Police has long argued that the agency is understaffed and underfunded.

Trump has taken advantage of the Park Police authority in D.C. to further his immigration crackdown and expand federal control over law enforcement in the city.

The expansion is intended to “enforce quality-of-life laws to protect against drug use, unpermitted demonstrations, vandalism, public intoxication, and to maximize immigration enforcement to apprehend and deport dangerous illegal aliens,” OMB wrote in its 2027 budget request to Congress.