Easily missed in the White House’s jaw-dropping $3.9 trillion, door-stopping 212-page budget for 2015 was an extra $55.1 million for the National Park Service. That tiny boost in the NPS’s $2.6 billion budget would allow the Park Service to add 200 new staffers, ending a long-term hiring freeze, and to prepare for its centennial in 2016.
While President Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872, it was President Woodrow Wilson who created the park service in 1916. Wilson signed the Organic Act into law, establishing the National Park Service “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
via Pacific Standard
Acadia National Park. (Photo: Gary Brownell/Flickr)
