Do people still say a car was “sold for parts”? The United States is being sold for parts—or simply handed over to oligarchs. It is a fire sale and a bankruptcy auction: a planned dismantling of everything from the military and higher education to scientific research and public lands.
The threat to sell part of Yosemite National Park involves a parcel roughly a quarter-mile wide along the park’s edge. But Yosemite is a crown jewel of the national park system and, arguably, the world’s first national park. Selling any part of it to benefit a corporation’s proposed development along the park’s western border would undermine the protection of national parks and sacrifice the public good for private profit. This is part of the Trump administration’s ongoing agenda.
Why Yosemite’s public land matters
Public lands belong to everyone. They are a gift from the past, protected by people who worked to preserve forests, mountains and canyons, and a trust for the future because the public includes everyone living in the country today and everyone yet to come.
The Trump administration’s efforts to transfer public lands for mining, logging and fossil fuel extraction—while dismantling the Forest Service and National Park Service—prioritize short-term profit for an elite over the long-term well-being of people and the natural world.
These lands have many forms of value. Trees and grasslands sequester carbon and help moderate the climate. Mountains serve as watersheds, while many natural areas now support rural tourism and outdoor recreation economies.
White settlers first entered Yosemite Valley in the early 1850s during a military campaign aimed at punishing, displacing or exterminating Indigenous people who were obstructing another era of environmental destruction: the Gold Rush. Miners hunted game, cut down trees, polluted rivers and massacred the region’s original inhabitants.
Some early visitors recognized Yosemite’s extraordinary scenic beauty, including its oak grasslands, towering canyon walls and waterfalls. By the 1860s, photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge had produced images of Yosemite that were displayed internationally. The valley became iconic before many white Americans had ever seen it.
In spring 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill establishing that “Yosemite Valley’s premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation; shall be inalienable for all time.” California initially managed the land because the federal government had little presence in the West and was occupied with the Civil War.
Yellowstone National Park, by contrast, was established eight years later as a federally managed preserve. Wyoming and Montana were not yet states, and Yellowstone is generally recognized as the first national park.
The document signed by Ulysses S. Grant stated that the land was to be “reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
National parks and Indigenous homelands
The creation of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and many other national parks was rooted in a fundamental injustice: these places were Indigenous peoples’ ancestral homelands long before Columbus sailed west or Lewis and Clark traveled across North America.
In Yosemite, some of those wrongs have been addressed over the past 30 years through changes to signage and historical interpretation, as well as the restoration of traditional use and ceremonial practices for descendants of the original inhabitants. The flawed premise of the national parks matters, but so does the fact that the system protected these places from privatization, development and destruction.
National Park Service funding under pressure
That protection is now being undermined across the Park Service. The Trump administration has been directing Park Service money intended for projects nationwide toward favored projects at the White House and in Washington, DC, including gilded statues and an inept $16 million painting of the reflecting pool.
Michael Scherer reports in The Atlantic that a fast-track approval process allows Trump projects to receive Park Service funding while the national park system is starved of resources. He notes “a decrease of $854m, or 68%, in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million.”
The administration has also proposed further cuts to the number of Park Service employees, whose ranks had already been reduced by 24% in 2025.
Giving away a piece of parkland is one form of harm. Removing the workers who protect endangered species and waterways, prevent fires and provide public services—from search and rescue to education and clean restrooms—is another.
Opening the ancient sacred site of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico to fracking would represent another form of destruction under the Trump administration. The same is true of the proposed 90% reduction of protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah.
As the Associated Press reported earlier this month, the radical reduction reverses “protections established by his Democratic predecessors on public lands that are sacred among many Native Americans. Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands, while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation.”
Yosemite was first protected during one civil war. Another struggle is now underway over whether the federal government exists to serve the many or the profiteering of the few. A small parcel in Yosemite is therefore a major indicator of who this country belongs to—and whose rights and interests matter.
Source: www.theguardian.com
