In Glacier National Park, septic systems at popular campgrounds, an aging bridge deck along Lake McDonald and chimney inspections are among the projects shelved on a “low priority” list after recent moves by the National Park Service, according to documents and data published by conservation groups this week.
The Center for Western Priorities and American Hunters and Anglers published the project lists, which include nearly 1,500 funding requests at park sites across the country, many of which the agency had approved but later canceled funding for.
The Park Service earlier this year reclassified around $400 million worth of projects at federal park sites around the country under a new “low priority” status, the Associated Press reported in August.
The priority shift came amid a push by President Donald Trump to fund expensive projects in Washington, D.C., for the country’s 250th anniversary, including a conspicuously botched attempt to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
“I look at this as dysfunction within the Park Service for not being communicative with the taxpayers that fund them,” Aaron Murphy, executive producer for American Hunters and Anglers, said Thursday. “From our perspective, several of these are certainly higher-priority projects.”
Murphy, who at one time worked as a ranger in Yellowstone National Park, singled out the postponed repairs to a septic system that serves one of Glacier’s major campgrounds, as well as employee housing and concessions in the Two Medicine area.
“You can’t screw around with a septic system going to hell,” he said.
The lists don’t include costs associated with individual items relegated to “low priority” for funding. Most requests — including all of Glacier’s “low priority” projects — are linked to a specific funding source, like park fees or the agency’s operational budget. But at other park sites, some entries indicate a funding source had not been identified.
The Park Service pushing off maintenance work to the next fiscal year is nothing new. Before retiring from the agency in 2013, Tim Hudson spent most of his three decades at Yellowstone National Park as its top maintenance official.
“There’s always projects that don’t have a chance of getting funded,” he said. He confirmed the “low priority” classification was a new move for the agency, but added, “I imagine every project that they wanted to do and didn’t get funding for was in the ‘low priority’ status.”
Current agency officials who shared the projects list with the Center for Western Priorities acknowledged not all of those were going to be funded, according to executive director Aaron Weiss.
“Some of them had funding sources already assigned, some of them were TBD — awaiting funding — and some of them had funding sources that have since been pulled or shifted into next year’s funding,” Weiss said.
The National Park Service did not respond Thursday to an emailed list of questions about its methods for prioritizing maintenance funding or Glacier’s projects that lost funding.
Glacier’s total backlog for deferred maintenance and repairs was already at about $132 million in 2025 — a number that has grown in recent years as congressional funding rarely meets the agency’s needs.
Jeff Mow was the park’s superintendent from 2013 to 2022 and now serves as the vice chair for the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. He said septic systems and other infrastructure-related issues are frequently deferred year to year under the limited funding available for needed maintenance and repairs.
“It’s not going to be overly dramatic, but these are things that need to be attended to because they only get worse over time,” Mow said Thursday.
Other projects assigned “low priority” in Glacier included rehab for the audio and video exhibits at the St. Mary Visitor Center, repairs for snow plow blades and new sewer lift stations at the Fish Creek Campground and Rising Sun.
Putting off chimney sweeping and inspections could lead to more dramatic problems, Mow noted. During his decades with the Park Service, Mow said he served on panels to evaluate and prioritize different maintenance requests. He described it as a “painstaking” — though transparent — process that he contrasted with the Trump administration awarding a no-bid contract to cover four statues near the National Mall in gold leaf this year.
While the National Park System includes a number of high-profile sites in Washington, Mow said in previous years that funding was on a more level field with other priorities scattered across the nation. In Trump’s second term, more of those agency dollars have been flowing back to Washington.
“A lot of the D.C. projects would never make it that high because they never sort of met those critical health-and-safety needs. That historically has always been the highest priority,” he said. “Putting gold gilt on statues would never rate very high.”