--- title: The National Park Repair Bill Reached $24 Billion in the Fund's Final Year description: The Great American Outdoors Act restoration fund lapsed in August 2025, and the Park Service's backlog rose to $24.2 billion in its final year. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) updated: 2026-07-31T19:29:08.487Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/national-park-repair-bill-24-billion-fund-final-year image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/zion-south-campground-park-repairs-78338.webp categories: Politics content_type: News region: United States publication: Sovereign Magazine schema_type: Article --- The federal fund that Congress created to work through America's national park repair backlog stopped paying out in August 2025. The backlog did not stop growing. At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, the National Park Service put the cost of the repairs it has not yet made at [$24.2 billion](https://www.nps.gov/subjects/infrastructure/deferred-maintenance.htm), spread across roads, buildings, utility systems and other structures at 70,687 locations. That is the highest of the three years the service has published on a consistent basis, and it is the year the money ran out. The National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund was created by the Great American Outdoors Act, Public Law 116-152, which President Donald Trump signed in 2020. It ran for five years on revenue from energy development on federal land and water rather than on general tax receipts, and it gave the Park Service up to $1.3 billion a year through 2025. The Interior Department, which also drew on the fund for wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management sites and Bureau of Indian Education schools, expects the [projects it paid for between 2021 and 2025](https://www.doi.gov/gaoa) to improve more than 3,800 of its assets. ## Five Years of Repairs, From a Sunken Seawall to a Snowmobile Bridge The Pew Charitable Trusts, which campaigns on public lands funding, says the fund supported more than 1,500 Interior Department and Forest Service projects across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The most visible of them sits a short walk from the National Mall. The Tidal Basin's seawall, built at the end of the 19th century, had sunk more than five feet in places, flooding the walkways and repeatedly soaking the roots of the cherry trees in salt water. The rebuilt wall has deeper foundations, a wider and reoriented walkway, and features meant to cope with rising sea levels. Nearly 270 new cherry trees have been planted along the edge of the basin. The rest of the list is less photogenic and more typical of what the estate actually needs. Glacier National Park in Montana had its water distribution system replaced, for drinking water and fire protection. Tuolumne Meadows Campground in Yosemite was rebuilt for $26.2 million. Zion National Park's South Campground, whose facilities dated from the 1930s and 1960s, reopened on May 29, 2026 with new campsites, bathrooms, walkways, bike paths and parking. In Arkansas, the Dale Bumpers White River National Wildlife Refuge had levees, boat ramps, bridges and parking lots repaired. The Bureau of Land Management replaced the only bridge into Sourdough Creek Campground on Alaska's Gulkana Wild and Scenic River. In Wisconsin, a snowmobile trail bridge in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest that could no longer carry grooming equipment was replaced. Pew says the work paid for itself in the local economies around it: Interior figures put more than 17,000 jobs and about $2 billion of economic activity against fund projects in 2025 alone, and 72,600 job-years and $15.9 billion of output against Park Service projects since the act passed. ## The Repair Bill Fell for One Year, Then Rose Again The Park Service publishes its own deferred maintenance and repair figures each year, drawn from federal real property data. Read together, the last three tell a plainer story than any of the individual projects. In 2023 the service counted 71,805 locations and a $23.3 billion repair bill. In 2024 the bill came down to $23.0 billion. In 2025 it went up to $24.2 billion, an increase of more than $1.2 billion in a single year, while the number of locations being tracked fell by more than 800. The pressure is not spread evenly. The Pacific West region carries the largest share at $6.4 billion, though that is lower than its 2023 figure. The Intermountain region has risen every year, from $5.1 billion to $5.4 billion. The sharpest move was in the National Capital region, home to the Tidal Basin: $3.0 billion in 2023, $2.7 billion in 2024, then $3.4 billion in 2025. None of this is a verdict on the fund, which was never large enough to clear a backlog of this size. The Park Service looks after more than 70,000 assets, many of them a century old, and the agencies together manage more than 250,000 sites, roads, bridges, trails, water systems, battlefields, campgrounds and memorials. Pew puts the combined backlog across all the federal land agencies at over $35 billion. ## Two Bills Would Extend the Fund for Another Five Years Two measures now sit in Congress to restart it, S.1547 in the Senate and H.R.9250 in the House. Pew says the Senate bill has cleared the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources with two-thirds of senators cosponsoring it, led by Steve Daines of Montana, Angus King of Maine, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Mark Warner of Virginia, Mike Lee of Utah and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. The House bill, written by Bruce Westerman of Arkansas and Jared Huffman of California, has cleared the Committee on Natural Resources with support from almost half the chamber. Both would require two-year project lists and fuller reporting to Congress. The president's budget request for 2027 also asks for the fund to be reauthorized. Until one of them passes, the repairs go back to competing for ordinary annual appropriations, which is the arrangement the backlog grew under in the first place. More on the group's public lands work is at [pewtrusts.org](https://www.pewtrusts.org). ## FAQ **Q: What is deferred maintenance?** It is repair work that has been identified as necessary but not yet carried out. The National Park Service inspects its roads, buildings, trails, utility systems and other structures each year and calculates what it would cost to bring them all to an acceptable and safe condition. That figure was $24.2 billion at the end of the 2025 fiscal year. **Q: What is the Legacy Restoration Fund?** The National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund was created by the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020 to pay down overdue maintenance on federal land. It was financed by revenue from energy development on federal land and water rather than by general taxation, and it covered national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management areas and Bureau of Indian Education schools. **Q: What happened to the Great American Outdoors Act funding?** The act itself remains law, and its permanent authorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund is unaffected. The five-year Legacy Restoration Fund inside it expired in August 2025. Two bills, S.1547 and H.R.9250, would extend it for another five years, and both have been approved by their committees.