The House Natural Resources Committee will take up a bipartisan proposal this coming week with well over 100 cosponsors. Its purpose is to pay for the enormous $16 billion maintenance backlog at facilities controlled by the National Parks system, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Restore Our Parks and Public Lands Act, which the Trump administration supports, has a simple premise, as House Natural Resources Chairman Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, put it in a recent interview with the Washington Examiner: “What we raise on federal lands will help us to maintain federal lands.” For the next five years, it dedicates half of the profit that the government makes from energy leases (mostly oil and gas leases) on federal lands and in federal waters, and uses it to pay for the much-needed backlog of expenses involved in keeping up public lands.
