jugtown

As everyone who lives in Western North Carolina knows, our National Parks and National Forests are the cornerstones of our tourism centric economy. And here we are, approaching the two year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, and parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway — America’s most visited National Park — remain closed. Before the added burden Hurricane Helene placed on our National Parks and Forests, there was already a $40 billion dollar maintenance and repair backlog (about $30 billion in National Parks and $10 billion in National Forests) due to chronic underfunding by Congress. Because our National Parks and Forests are so important to our region, when I ran for Congress I said that if I was elected I wanted a seat on the Natural Resources Committee that oversees the parks and forests (and on Veterans Affairs to look out for our Veterans and our VA hospital). So what is Trump doing? He’s diverting National Park Service funding to his own vanity projects, like more than $5 million dollars he spent to gold plate statues in DC and over $16 million dollars on his reflecting pool debacle. According to reporting by Scott MacFarland, in 2024 (Biden’s last full year in office), funding for upkeep of the White House and the National Mall was $20 million dollars. In 2026 (Trump’s first full year in office), the amount skyrocketed to $423 million dollars. You may say well, $423 million dollars isn’t a huge sum of money considering the size of the federal government, but it is a gigantic sum when you consider that the entire National Park Service budget for 2026 is $2.1 billion dollars (it was $3.3 billion dollars in 2024). So, Trump takes over 20% of the Park Service budget to make his surroundings opulent while the parks and forests in our surroundings do without. I guess you can do that when you’re the king and the Congress is controlled by your servile sycophants.