Sled dogs at Denali National Park are among the casualties of the Trump administration’s decision to block more than $25 million already earmarked for the national parks, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
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The Interior Department disapproved upward of 130 planned partnership agreements last month, killing projects at Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion and dozens of other sites before the money could be released for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, the report found.
One of the rejected agreements would have hired three people to handle day-to-day care at Denali’s kennel, the only working sled dog kennel in the entire park system, where rangers rely on dog teams for winter patrols. Without it, the documents warn, kennel operations lose essential support and patrol readiness suffers.
Joshua Tree National Park took the hardest hit, with at least 10 agreements blocked. Those deals would have hired at least 16 people, helped restore wildfire-scarred terrain and cleared hantavirus-carrying rodents out of historic buildings.
“If this work is not completed, the park will be unable to fight wildfire,” the documents state. Park insiders have described a slow-motion collapse across the system to The Atlantic.
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Tree removal at Iowa’s Effigy Mounds National Monument, where 61 trees stand inside prehistoric burial mounds and could expose human remains if they topple, was also scrapped, along with a San Francisco Zoological Society partnership to raise endangered San Francisco garter snakes at Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady said the department rejected agreements with “groups actively working against the best interests of the American people and the priorities of this administration,” but declined to name them.
The Great Basin Institute lost more than 70 agreements worth $12.7 million.
Former acting superintendent Elaine Leslie wants to know where the cash landed. The agency has already funneled park fees into Washington, D.C., for beautification and is quietly drafting another reorganization after shedding roughly a quarter of its staff.
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