(Photo credit: Congressman Ciscomani Facebook page, with some edits by the Unseat Ciscomani Team)
You can tell a lot about someone from the company they keep. In April our congressman, Juan Ciscomani, welcomed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to Southern Arizona to give him the grand tour. As our representative said in a press release, “This visit gave Congressman Ciscomani an opportunity to show Secretary Burgum what makes southeastern Arizona so unique—from mining to our beautiful landscapes.”
Meanwhile, back in Washington, DC, where Burgum toils devotedly for President Donald Trump, the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management he oversees are under siege. Not from wild animals or vicious illegal immigrants. They are attacked by Trump, Burgum, and the rest of Washington’s Republican establishment. Congressman Ciscomani, as usual when the GOP is laying waste to things important to Americans, is standing mute on the sidelines, unwilling, or afraid, to stand up for his people and the Sonoran Desert.
What’s happening at the national parks? First, budget cuts begun by the DOGE evisceration of the government in 2025 have resulted in the Park Service losing 24 percent of its permanent workforce. Its current annual operating budget of $32 billion sounds enormous (Ciscomani raved about it on his Facebook account!). But the truth is that the NPS budget has been flatlined during this Trump administration, despite pressing needs for keeping up with maintenance and restoration of buildings, trails, etc., in the parks.
Ciscomani took Burgum on a stroll of the Saguaro National Park. It was a great photo opportunity for them. With others around, it’s likely they didn’t discuss the wholesale transfer of Park Service funding to the Washington area to appease Trump’s gold-leafed, grandiose ideas of how the nation’s capital should look to a man of bad taste. The parks’ budgets have been raided, including an estimated $100 million in entrance fees directed to DC projects. NPS officials out in the field are giving up even more from their maintenance budgets (including $254 in the region that includes Saguaro and five other locations in Ciscomani’s district).
Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, a former ranger himself and the son of another, wrote recently that “never—not once in decades—have I witnessed such systematic degradation, disrespect and dismantling of the National Park Service as I see today under the thumb of President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.”
How are things in the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 244 million acres of federal land? Its budget was cut two percent in the current year. But that may not matter much, since the Trump administration is bent on giving away big chunks of its holdings. In July Trump signed an Executive Order cutting three million acres from two Utah national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Trump’s public reasons were weak and specious: “You can’t do anything [on the properties]. You can’t go hunting, you can’t go fishing, you can’t walk on them.” In fact, the Arizona Republic reported, monument rules “usually preserve existing activities like traditional livestock grazing, hunting, fishing and other such recreational activities.” The real reason for the order may be that the two monuments were established by a Democratic president, Barack Obama, and returned to their original sizes by President Biden after Trump ordered them reduced in his first term. Trump loves to diminish their achievements when he can, no matter the victims.
Throughout it all, Burgum has distinguished himself by being made a laughingstock. Burgum’s people went on a tear earlier this year to eliminate signage at National Parks that contained “inappropriate content”, meaning mentions of slavery, climate change, women’s rights and the like. The Interior Department asked park visitors for suggestions and got called out. One commenter accused Interior of “having Americans call in and snitch on each other.” Another commented “Hey Donald Trump! Trying to erase history doesn’t mean it didn’t still happen.”
Burgum’s latest public humiliation was to insist that the disaster resulting from Trump’s mandate to recoat the bottom of the iconic Reflecting Pool on the National Mall was an act of vandalism. David Hearn, a visitor to the National Mall (and a three-time Olympian, talk about an example of American heroism) was arrested, but his charges were dropped last week.
US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a Trump appointee who seems to want to be able to keep her law license when this administration’s assault on the rule of law is over, found out that the reports Burgum’s office had given her were false, and that “newly disclosed evidence showed the damage to the pool stemmed largely from flawed contractor work rather than vandalism.” (We, the People, paid $16 million to an unqualified no-bid contractor hired by Burgum for this shoddy job).
Pirro also maintained that her office would have never charged Hearn in the first place if Interior hadn’t withheld information.
It’s not only the public and the facts that put Burgum in a bad light. Politico.com reports that many Interior staffers can’t stand him either. Tony Irish, who worked at Interior for more than 20 years, including as associate solicitor for general law until he left last year, said “Burgum appears to combine arrogance with an utter lack of curiosity or humility to seek out the advice of people who have dedicated their professional careers to [Interior’s] objectives. I think it shows his disdain for the rank and file.”
So, some of America’s crown jewels are having their resources slashed and siphoned off for Trump feel-good projects, while Burgum embarrasses himself. Juan Ciscomani is always happy for the PR value of what he says are his contributions to our parks’ beauty. But the truth lies far away, as far as the distance between the crested saguaros in the Saguaro National Park and the Grand Canyon.
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