From the perspective of anyone who went to a national park during the the longest lapse in federal funding in U.S. history, things might have seemed fairly normal.
Parks were kept open during a busy fall season by using recreation-fee dollars that paid for skeleton crews. And despite the limited personnel on site, few public reports of vandalism or trash buildup emerged over the six-week government shutdown, a stark contrast with the last one five years ago.
But behind the public facade, some of the National Park Service’s 433 sites could end up feeling pain over the long term.
Parks lost millions of dollars in revenue from uncollected fees and spent a large portion of their saved fees. That means the parks, which already face a collective $23 billion backlog of deferred maintenance, could be at a significant deficit closing out the year, according to advocates, former park leaders and the nonprofits that help run bookstores and funnel philanthropy into sites. Park rangers in many locations have also missed critical windows to do wildlife and resource management projects before the winter — the kind of work that the public rarely sees but remains important to the NPS mission.
