A couple of months ago, I obtained a permit from the US Forest Service to travel 4x4 and off highway vehicle trails in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The permit cost $25 plus postage, and was valid for a year. The trails my group rode on a Saturday turned out to be crowded with other vehicles, and we spent hours waiting for other groups to pass. I suspect many users would have been willing to pay a higher price for higher-demand trails or peak usage times, maybe incentivizing some with schedule flexibility to enjoy the trails on weekdays. But without market pricing, everyone paid with their time.
Visits to government recreation lands are cheap—in 2025, a pass allowing a carload of people a year’s unlimited access to all national parks and other federal lands cost only $80, and for a single week’s entry to one park, the entry is $35. With low prices, popular destinations can see millions of visits a year. But crowds bring traffic, litter, noise, vandalism, disturbances to wildlife, and pressure to build and maintain additional infrastructure. Some government land—urban and rural—is occupied by squatters whose makeshift encampments take advantage of indifferent enforcement of limits on long-term camping. While “access to public land” is a popular political objective, it is not clear that the trade-offs are being taken into account. A policy that gains voter approval or maximizes campaign contributions from conservation organizations or support from park concessionaires is not necessarily one that maximizes the value of the land.
Environmental research organizations like the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) and Resources for the Future have suggested increasing entry fees for national parks and other public lands. This has resulted in some change. On July 3, 2025, an executive order from President Trump directed the Secretary of the Interior to increase fees for non-US citizens. But as long as these lands are government-managed, the essential information from market prices and profits and losses will be missing. A bureaucrat in the National Park Service, US Forest Service, or other land-management entity is incentivized to extract larger budgets from elected officials for the well-being of the bureaucracy. The users of the government land are incentivized to push the costs onto non-users. The elected officials are incentivized to satisfy a variety of concentrated interest groups (e.g., park users, park concessionaires, contractors, bureaucrats, and environmental advocacy organizations) while spreading the costs across millions of taxpayers.
This politicized process is unlikely to result in an optimal entry fee or efficient park management. In a market system, an entrepreneur’s search for profit will induce the entrepreneur to assess what potential customers will want and at what price. They will then choose, acquire, and organize the ingredients of production to provide that envisioned product, and constantly revise the production process as consumers demonstrate with their dollars how well the entrepreneur has satisfied their desires. Without the information and the incentives from profits and losses, satisfying customers is just guesswork. Those who are content to leave land in government hands and seek to tweak entry fees are neglecting the root of the problem—and overlooking the complex and wide-ranging decisions that must be made.
For instance, how much congestion is optimal? Some people go to national parks and wilderness areas looking for solitude and contact with nature. Wildlife viewing may be diminished as more humans are present. With a downward-sloping demand curve for solitary contemplation of nature, there is a trade-off between lower entry fees and fewer encounters with other people. So what is optimal for the manager of a park—a few park visitors who pay enormous fees for high levels of solitude, or a great many park visitors who pay low fees for views without much solitude? With some experimentation, parks could probably arrive at an entry fee schedule that maximizes revenue. But this is not sufficient to solve the park manager’s information problems, because it treats the park “good” as though it were not subject to any innovation or modification. Advocates of higher fees often treat park facilities as a constant, so that the only question is about how to meet some fixed budget. For fiscal 2023, the National Park Service’s maintenance backlog was estimated to be over $23 billion, with problems in water systems, buildings, roads and bridges, and other structures.
But the quantity and type of services that government-run land provides is not fixed—it is yet another variable. How upgraded should the drinking water systems in Grand Canyon National Park and Yellowstone National Park be? Should there be more roads, parking lots, overlooks, trails, ranger stations, medical facilities, guided tours, lodges, campgrounds, gift shops, restaurants, and toilet facilities? Or fewer? How luxurious, or how spartan, should facilities be? For seasonally-operated facilities, when should they be opened or closed? Where should they all be located? Should the management and operation of these facilities be in-house, or contracted out to concessionaires? How many resources should be devoted to preventing wildfires? All of these decisions alter the very nature of the good being offered to customers, and must take into account the changing opportunity costs of all the inputs, not just once but for as long as the good is provided.
This is an impossible task in the absence of a market system. Without the motivation to earn profits and avoid losses, and with the necessity of reporting to (and extracting tax dollars from) elected officials, park managers have little incentive to learn what park visitors want, or to make innovations to satisfy visitor preferences. Park bureaucracies are also politically insulated from bearing the opportunity costs of their inputs, because much of their operating budget comes from tax dollars, and because they do not experience the cost of rejecting market offers for their indispensable input—the land itself. In the absence of market-determined profit and loss, the government land bureaucracy cannot begin to discover the best ways to manage these assets for visitors, much less manage them for a nebulous “public interest.”
Consistent with bureaucracies of all kinds, park bureaucracies must comply with rules set by top-level officials who may know little about the problems at the park level. Aware, too, that giving discretion to local managers comes with additional monitoring costs, bureaucrats and elected officials in Washington may prefer a simple, inflexible rule that eases their oversight challenges. But one consequence of relying on centralized directives is that they create perverse incentives at the local level. One such rule is the one that requires parks to spend 55 percent of fee revenues on deferred maintenance, to the detriment of routine maintenance. Park superintendents thus are incentivized to spend a smaller proportion on regular maintenance than would be ideal, and let things fall apart before repairing or replacing them. Ultimately, this kind of problem will not be rectified by simply encouraging centralized bureaucrats to give their subordinates more discretion. The problem is, as Mises pointed out in Bureaucracy in 1944, inherent to a system of political control. Rather than the simple profit/loss test of success or failure, the only possible management option for a political entity is to create and enforce bureaucratic directives.
Addressing the absurd consequences of rules like the 55 percent deferred maintenance rule requires that the managers of parks be evaluated by profit and loss, which cannot be as long as the parks remain government entities.
Even non-profit entities would be better able to engage in economic calculation, as they seek to use assets to accomplish their objectives. If the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, or some other private conservation organization were to gain title to a national park, it is entirely possible that the new owners would find that maximizing the value of the natural amenities would require raising prices, reducing the number of visitors, or imposing restrictions on visitation that have a similar effect. Or they might pursue more extensive development of park areas. If, as owners, ideologically-oriented associations were faced with bearing the actual costs and benefits of alternative uses of the land, they might use the land in ways that are quite different from what they currently ask of politicians.
The Washington Monument Syndrome
We can see that government land managers have neither the information nor the incentives to provide satisfaction to land users or to implement conventional conservation practices. But the bureaucracy’s incentives sometimes go beyond ignorance or indifference, and push them to deliberately shut down popular services to create pressure on politicians. In 1969, when the National Park Service failed to get all it wanted from Congress, the NPS reduced opening days for sites under its control that included the Washington Monument and Grand Canyon National Park, supposedly because it couldn’t afford them. Tourists—unaware of the deceptive political theater—complained to their supposedly stingy representatives. Congress soon relented, giving the Park Service bureaucrats what they wanted and giving us a new term for the weaponizing of bureaucratic discretion to extort larger budget allocations from government: the Washington Monument Syndrome.
The tactic has been employed repeatedly by bureaucracies under threat, even when keeping its functions operational would entail only modest expense or even where shutting it down would cost more. In 2013, during a federal government “shutdown,” Recreation Resource Management, Inc.—a government contractor that managed national parks and campgrounds across about a dozen states—was told to close its facilities. But the campgrounds were financially self-sufficient and actually paid the National Park Service out of their revenues. During that same “shutdown,” the NPS barricaded off the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC—entailing a greater use of resources to keep people out than would have been required to keep the outdoor monument open. The NPS fenced off the Lincoln Memorial and hired a night watchman to keep people out, though the memorial had previously been open 24/7 with no overnight staff. In some parts of the country, scenic overlooks, which require no staffing, were blocked off to vehicles. A “living history” colonial farm in McLean, Virginia was shut down, though the farm had been financially self-sufficient for 32 years, requiring no staff or funds from the government. The NPS went so far as to send the Park Police to kick people out of the farm as they were setting up for a large annual event. “You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” said the farm’s managing director. A few years earlier, a government zoo bureaucracy—Zoo New England—threatened to close two Boston zoos and kill some animals in the face of budget cuts. The more dramatic and upsetting the steps a threatened bureaucracy can take, the more successful it will be in obtaining the budget it demands. Contrast this to the behavior of privately owned institutions faced with tighter budgets—cutbacks are focused on those products that aren’t popular enough to justify continued production.
While talk of privatizing government land often sparks fears of ruined landscapes and careless management, the results could be quite the opposite. Were parks, forests, and other government-run land to be turned over to private owners, we might see an improvement in precisely the kind of experiences users of government lands most desire.
