First, let’s review the National Park Service’s prospectus. NPS is a provider of world-class outdoor recreational opportunities and unique educational programs, along with transportation and utilities management services. NPS provides scientific expertise in, among others, the fields of archeology, anthropology, and bio-diversity while excelling as a provider of hospitality services to more than 280 million visitors from around the world each year.

This organization, founded in 1916, currently operates 388 subsidiaries in 49 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Marianas and Virgin Islands. It’s real estate holdings include some 88 million acres and the company employs more than 20,000 people.

And, according to internal memos, the National Park Service is essentially insolvent. While the Service’s operating budget of about $1.7 billion has increased steadily over the years, it has failed to keep pace even with inflation. That’s not to mention enormous increases in fixed costs such as Congressionally mandated, and well-deserved, COLAs (2.4 percent this year), natural disaster clean up ($51 million for Hurricane Isabelle) and new homeland security responsibilities ("Code Orange" days alone have cost $5 million).

The National Parks Conservation Association estimates the NPS annual budget shortfall at $600 million. Historic structures and ancient archeological sites are collapsing, tens of thousands of visitors are denied access to ranger-led programs, wildlife populations are dwindling and roads and bridges are crumbling. Cancelling foreign travel, on which the NPS spent about $300,000 last year, doesn’t even qualify as a drop in the bucket.

So how did we get here? The answer lies in the Bush Administration’s willful neglect of National Parks. For the upcoming fiscal year, the Administration proposes to stem this $600 million hemorrhage with a budget increase of about .3% over last year’s request. Talk about trying to fight a forest fire with a squirt gun.

Unbelievably, the Administration continues to impoverish the NPS even further by forcing the agency to pay consultants to study privatizing park operations. These studies have produced no evidence of cost savings but have diverted millions from the Service’s operating budget.

Then, in order to evade responsibility for this management failure, the Administration has provided instructions as to the best ways to hide the impending disaster from the American public. NPS employees have been told to refer to any proposed cutbacks not as cutbacks but as "service level adjustments." And the one employee who didn’t get the memo, Park Police Chief Theresa Chambers, was targeted for termination for discussing NPS budget shortfalls honestly.

If the Bush Administration continues to under fund the National Park System by hundreds of millions of dollars a year, they will have no choice but to begin firing Park Rangers or closing Parks. Once that starts to happen, if you want to see a well-managed, well-funded national park, foreign travel will be your only option.