National Park Week Is No Walk in the Park for Taxpayers
(Drew Johnson is a senior fellow with the Taxpayers Protection Alliance) This week is National Park Week, an utterly arbitrary annual celebration concocted by federal bureaucrats as an excuse to waive entrance fees at national parks and historic sites. The idea of free admission to America’s national parks may induce a case of the warm fuzzies at first blush, but the cold reality is that taxpayers who don’t visit parks during National Park Week will be left footing the bill for those who do. Worse, National Park Week masks a harsher truth about the National Park Service (NPS): Taxpayers are paying $2.9 billion to subsidize scores of unimpressive parks and trivial historic sites that have no business being managed by the federal government. The first indication that taxpayers should hold on to their wallets is the fact that National Park “Week” lasts from April 21 to 29. Allowing a group of people who apparently believe a week contains nine days to manage an agency whose budget is literally larger than the gross domestic products of Belize and the Cayman Islands combined has trouble written all over it.