Category: Travel News

Donald Trump announced today via his press secretary Sean Spicer that he was donating his first quarter's pay to the National Park Service during a press conference.  Spicer held up the check for $78,333 that represented the first quarter of the annual salary of the President Of The United States (currently $400,000.) While there was no elaborate discussion as to why Trump had chosen the Park Service to be the recipient of this donation, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke who heads the agency which protects 417 national parks, monuments and other sites, said he was "thrilled" at Trump's decision. "We are going to dedicate and put it against the infrastructure on our nation's battlefields," Zinke stated. "We are about $229 million behind in deferred maintenance on our battlefields alone," Zinke said.  With the push that Trump has aimed at expanding the US military as well as a development of a national sense of patriotism, there is a good chance that the allocation of the donation towards the battlefields instead of the maintenance of national park spaces like Bryce and Zion was predetermined.  While maintenance budgets are essentially running in the red on nearly all US national parks, any ability to alleviate some of the issues through donations like this one are welcomed.  There could easily de determined that there is a political motivation behind the decision to donate as long as the funds were appropriated towards the maintenance of areas that fit into Trump's agenda, Parks Service officials view any funding as welcomed.  This helps the battlefields, but does little to assist in the maintenance of areas that Trump has alluded to being supportive of potentially turning over to private industry for development.  The battle over federal land and the protection of park spaces has long been a partisan issue. The 2016 budget