Entrances to national parks will be blocked and thousands of park rangers will be furloughed if Congress doesn’t reach a budget agreement this weekend, the Department of Interior said Friday.
The stance is a reversal from five years ago, when the Trump administration kept some parks open in a move that has been lambasted as illegal by the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog.
About 13,000 of the 19,000 National Park Service workers are expected to be furloughed, the agency said in a contingency plan posted online Friday. For example, trash cans and portable toilets overflowed at Joshua Tree National Park during a shutdown in late 2018 and early 2019 that lasted 35 days. Some tourists driving off road damaged the fragile ecosystem.
Utah paid some $7,500 daily during the last part of December 2018 to keep Zion, Bryce Canyon and Arches running during a shutdown. The nonprofit Zion Forever Project put up $16,000 to pay a skeleton crew and keep bathrooms and the visitor center open at Zion, which continued drawing several thousand visitors daily.
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