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'Catastrophic' cost of Trump's gluttonous gilding exposed in bombshell NYT report

rawstory.com · 5h · first reportShare

President Donald Trump's gluttonous hunger to gild Washington, D.C has left America's national parks in dire turmoil, according to experts sounding the alarm. Trump has cut national park staff across the country and steered fee revenue toward his projects in D.C., including the botched Reflecting Pool repairs and covering statues on the National Mall in gold, the New York Times reported Saturday. Longtime park officials fear the losses will be hard to reverse. "Any one of these changes could be catastrophic in its own right, especially as it relates to staffing and funding," Dan Wenk, the former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, told The Times. "When the next administration comes, Republican or Democrat, funding may be restored, but it's going to be incredibly difficult to rebuild." The National Park Service, where Wenk worked for nearly 43 years before retiring, oversees 433 sites. The cutbacks now reach parks in nearly every region, The Times reported. Reductions that bega