Millions of dollars meant to beef up National Park Service staffing could be trimmed under President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to claw back unspent funds from a key Biden administration measure.
One of the big winners in the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, the park service received $500 million to hire new personnel. An internal review found that as of last May, the park service had allocated only $21 million of the total and hired about a third of the staffers covered by the funding.
NPS has since picked up its hiring pace and now says about half of the anticipated 1,418 new employees have come on board.
Money that’s left over once Trump takes office, though, could be vulnerable under his campaign promise to, as he repeatedly pledged on the stump, “rescind all unspent funds” provided under the Inflation Reduction Act.
