Will Visitation to National Parks Continue to Increase?

The National Park Service falls under the Department of the Interior (DOI) which the Trump Administration announced in the end of March will be seeing 11.7 percent cuts, approximately $1.6 billion, in government funding. On April 3 however, President Trump donated his first-quarterly presidential salary to the National Parks Service (NPS), writing a check for approximately $78 thousand.

The NPS maintains almost 400 parks, recreation areas, and historic sites, all of which have steady and/or increasing attendance in the last ten years with an overall visitation increase of 20 percent. This trend spanned the 2008-09 recession, where visitation was not noticeably affected, and even improved to a peak in 2009, not reached again until 2014.

In 2016 recreational visits to NPS units reached an all-time high of 330 million. Of the NPS approximately 400 units, 59 are National Parks. In 2016, those 59 National Parks contributed 68 million visits to the NPS total. The National Parks are mostly dispersed throughout the western United States, with California and Alaska hosting the most with nine and eight respectively.

Yellowstone was the first National Park and was established on March 1, 1872. Since then more and more parks have steadily been added, spiking in the year 1980 when nine parks opened in the same year. The trend is slowing now as on four new parks have been established in the 21st century, the latest in 2013. Despite the lack of new development attendance has continued to thrive.

The question remains how the parks will handle the cuts in federal funding for the DOI. Currently, the support for national parks in light of the recent events and general trend of high visitation are helping keep the parks on the map.