National parks are facing a triple whammy – underfunding, reduced staffing, and what some call unprecedented federal oversight. Central Illinois is home to three National Park Service (NPS) sites, including the Lincoln Home, and they’ve been affected, too. While effects vary by park, across the nation they include altered history, fearful staff, reduced hours and park safety and upkeep challenges. The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and the National Park Conservation Association (NPCA) call the situation a “crisis.”
In 2025, parks had 323 million visits. Twenty-six set “new visitation records,” according to the NPS website. If you’re visiting parks this summer, “be prepared for traffic, crowds and unpredictability,” says the NPCA. Call ahead to check the situation and see if the park still has a reservations system, advises Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. Overcrowding at Yosemite National Park Memorial Day weekend was “like Disneyland” with “insane” waits for shuttle service, reported Fox News on May 26.
Since January 2025, “employee terminations, forced retirements, resignations and buyouts” as well as budget cuts have decreased NPS staff by 25%, says Thompson. Her organization is an advocacy group of 5,000 former, current and retired NPS workers and volunteers. While the parks were underfunded and understaffed before, she says, the situation has worsened. “There are less employees for visitors to talk to, less tours and less staff to work the front gate.” Employees tell her they’re concerned about having enough staff for “search and rescue” missions and that overcrowding will “impact the ability of emergency vehicles to get where they need to go.”
Central Illinois’ NPS sites are: the Lincoln Home and two new sites being developed – the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument near Ninth and Madison streets and the New Philadelphia National Historic Site, east of Barry. (The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is not an NPS site.) Tourists visited the Lincoln Home nearly 123,500 times last year, according to nps.gov.
Once fully established as parks, which can normally take 10 years, the two new sites could increase tourism here. But there’s concern that reduced funding and increased oversight may impede or even risk the new parks’ development. Area NPS sites and staff have been adversely affected already.
Multiple attempts to get reactions, confirmation and information for this article from the superintendent of this area’s three local NPS sites and other current NPS staff were unsuccessful. Staff must now refer reporters to the NPS Communications Office in Washington, D.C., which can only be reached through a generic email; it has no publicly available phone number. The D.C. office did not respond to three emails. A staffer with a satellite office responded to one question about changes at the Lincoln Home and asked to be identified as a “National Park Service spokesperson.”
Information for this article came from park advocacy groups, federal government websites and employee publications, former NPS employees, historians who’ve worked with central Illinois’ parks and various media.
Reduced funding
Congress cut the NPS budget 6% for the current fiscal year, instead of the 30% President Donald Trump proposed. The whole park system has a nearly $23 billion backlog of delayed maintenance; the Lincoln Home had $3.8 million worth of deferred maintenance and repairs as of a year ago, according to the NPS website.
Unlike some parks, a July 2025 NPS Staffing Impact Data report said the Lincoln Home had no impacts from staffing issues. However, the superintendent is now overseeing the 1908 Race Riot and New Philadelphia sites as well.
For the 2027 fiscal year, which begins in October, Trump has proposed cutting the NPS budget 32%. According to the 2027 Budget Justifications for the Department of the Interior, which oversees America’s parks, historic and cultural sites, “This budget supports the Administration’s priority of maintaining our parks’ key assets and reducing deferred maintenance across the park system…by streamlining burdensome administrative processes, while maintaining core operations such as law enforcement and safety, visitor services and facility operations and maintenance.”
Restoring truth and sanity
On March 27, 2025, Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The purpose is to “combat corrosive, factually baseless ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, the National Zoo, federal parks, monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties in order to “reestablish truth in the historical narrative” and ensure that “American history is celebrated accurately, fairly and with pride,” the order states. “The prior administration pushed a divisive ideology that reconstrued America’s promotion of liberty as fundamentally flawed, infecting revered institutions like the Smithsonian and national parks with false narratives.”
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum mandated that feds review natural and historic resources for any “false construction of American history, false minimization of the value of certain historical events or figures, or improper partisan ideology,” in a May 20, 2025, Secretarial Order. They will look for content that “disparages Americans past or living” instead of “focusing on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
Signs about African Americans, slavery, women, LGBTQ and indigenous people, and climate science have been removed from some parks as a result. At Grand Teton National Park, a sign about a U.S. military officer’s role in a Native American massacre was taken down, according to 2026 reports from CNN and Montana local media. At Acadia National Park, signs about indigenous people and climate change were removed, according to Alan Spears, a historian and government liaison with the NPCA, the advocacy group for national parks. “The word transgender has been scrubbed from the National Park Service websites,” he says. On New York’s Stonewall National Monument website, a landmark for the LGBTQ rights movement, the acronym LGBTQ has been changed to LGB.
The website missingparkhistory.org has a national map marking parks where signs have been deleted or targeted for federal review. It’s operated by Save Our Signs – a group of volunteers, including at least one Springfieldian who wants to remain anonymous. The website also archived parks’ websites as they were before the Restoring Truth and Sanity orders.
National parks materials are researched and written by historians with NPS, one of America’s largest employers of historians, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Federal law already mandates the National Park Service be nonpartisan. It’s not allowed to take political stands, it’s very clear,” says Devin Hunter, University of Illinois Springfield associate professor of history. “(The federal oversight) initiative is unprecedented.”
“There’s a great deal of pressure coming down from the administration to make sure park staff are aligning themselves with the president and his policy,” says Spears.
Thompson agrees: “There’s a real culture of fear among NPS employees right now – fear of retribution and fear of losing your job.” Spears says they won’t even talk to him as an advocacy group rep anymore.
Park staff who interpret a site’s history are especially worried, he adds. Those on Civil War battlefields may feel concerned saying the “truth that African American and African slavery were the root causes of the Civil War, for fear that somebody might take it the wrong way” and report it.
Trump’s initiative requires all national parks to have a QR code and directions advising visitors to submit comments through it if they find “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur and abundance of landscapes and other natural features,” according to the interior secretary’s order.
“The signs are asking people to contradict crucial scientific and historical facts that have been vetted for accuracy by experts at the National Park Service,” said NPCA President and CEO Theresa Pierno on the NPCA website.
“I need to make this clear – they’re not having these signs removed because they are inaccurate,” Spears says. “There isn’t anybody questioning the validity or the interpretation being offered by the NPS. They’re taking it down because they think it might make somebody feel uncomfortable. And that’s unacceptable.”
A year ago, the June 18 Government Executive, an online magazine for “high-ranking civilian and military officials who are responsible for defending the nation and carrying out the laws,” reported that days after the QR codes were up, the public’s comments only “implored the administration not to erase U.S. history and praised agency staff for improving their experiences.”
On May 28, the Sierra Club released a motherlode – 35,000 largely positive comments that visitors submitted at national parks. The Department of the Interior provided them because of the Sierra Club’s continuing lawsuit over the Restoring Truth and Sanity orders. Some comments, like one submitted at the Lincoln Home, disparaged interior secretary Burgum. Others praised the parks and park employees, asked that more be hired and called for needed repairs such as addressing dirty bathrooms, long lines and unmaintained campgrounds.
Many comments were similar to these: “Park rangers and volunteers go above and beyond to tell America’s full history,” “The sign with this QR code is un-American,” and “I protest in the strongest terms these new Trump-era signs trying to whitewash American history.”
The 2025 Restoring Truth and Sanity federal orders move us “backwards,” says Brian Mitchell, a historian and University of Illinois Springfield Lincoln Studies Center research fellow. “Even though we know all this stuff (in history) happened, let’s pretend it didn’t happen…and we’ll go back to these old interpretations that said everything was hunky dory and we all got along.”
“It’s healthy to talk about complicated and traumatic events in our history, if done properly,” says Hunter. “I think it’s harmful the more you repress and deny investigating some of those things.”
These historians describe history as “a tool” that should be used to help us understand the successes and mistakes our society has made so we can do better in the future. To do that, they say, we must look fully at our past, warts and all.
Lincoln Home
“The rangers and their supervisors at Lincoln Home are now extremely limited in the conversations and activities they can take part in,” says Mitchell. “I’ve been at meetings with them and they’ve said, ‘We can’t participate in that upcoming meeting,’ in public discussions they think will dabble into the discussions of race and violence.” Hunter says he’s observed the same thing.
This sign about the Lincolns’ African American neighbors who helped enslaved people seeking freedom is also flagged for federal review, according to missingparkhistory.org. PHOTO BY TARA MCCLELLAN MCANDREW
The Lincoln Home’s website has also been affected. While national parks used to control their own websites, the federal government now controls them and makes sure they meet the president’s standards, according to a May 1, 2026, article by Politico’s E&E News. According to missingparkhistory.org, the Lincoln Home website used to have information about “efforts to conserve the natural world, preserve wilderness and control pollution,” but that was removed after January 2025.
When asked about the federal oversight’s effects on parks and if signs had been changed at the Lincoln Home, an NPS spokesperson said: “The Department of the Interior is implementing Secretary’s Order 3431, which carries out President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order on ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.’ The President has directed federal agencies to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty and alignment with shared national values. No material has been removed or altered at this site.”
Two signs in the Lincoln Home neighborhood have been “flagged for review” by the federal government, according to missingparkhistory.org. One describes the “diversity” of Lincon’s neighborhood, including the “indentured servants who lived with their white employers.” The other describes two African American families on the street who helped people escaping enslavement.
While the Lincoln Home used to present programs on topics including Lincoln’s varied neighbors, a ranger answering the public phone number confirmed that the only presentations it will have this summer will be the annual History Comes Alive summer programming coordinated by the Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer says Lincoln’s neighbors are “an integral part of the Lincoln saga. The years spent creating the Lincoln neighborhood and making that street so authentic (to its appearance in 1860) … broaden the story to Lincoln’s community, to the relationship between white and black neighbors, wealthy and poor neighbors, professionals and people like Billy Fleurville, his barber. That should still be part of an interpretation. Anything less relegates the Lincoln Home to the status of an old curiosity shop.”
The Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument
In 2024, the site where five African American homes were burned during the Springfield 1908 race riot became a national monument, but it will take about 10 years to fully develop. The riot led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The only indication of the site is a sign on the southeast end of HSHS St. John’s Hospital Women and Children’s Clinic parking lot, next to Madison Street.
“I’m concerned about the 1908 Monument’s national park status,” says Mitchell. “We don’t know what will be next … when you look at the erasure going on at other sites you can’t help but be a little concerned. I know others who have concerns about many national parks that have diverse histories and other local people who are concerned about the future of the 1908 Monument.”
The only thing at the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument is a sign. It became part of the National Park Service in 2024. Some Springfieldians are concerned its development is at risk. PHOTO BY TARA MCCLELLAN MCANDREW
Michael Ward was the NPS deputy regional director for the Midwest and helped the 1908 and New Philadelphia areas become NPS sites. He retired from the Park Service last July after beginning his career at the Lincoln Home in 1983 and keeps in touch with current NPS employees from various areas. He agrees that the federal Restoring Truth and Sanity orders could risk the 1908 Monument’s development. However, “right now there isn’t something (at the Monument site) for the federal government to focus on yet; there’s no museum or exhibit,” Ward says.
The monument is significant for several reasons, says Holzer. “The 1908 riot was a natural outgrowth of the Lincoln story. He created more opportunity for people of color in this country, and the riot struck at the conscience of white America in the North as well as the South. It was Lincoln who twice said the North had been too complicit in southern slavery. (The monument) is especially important since the riot occurred in Lincoln’s hometown and inspired the creation of the NAACP.”
New Philadelphia National Historic Site
Not to be confused with the current town of New Philadelphia, the New Philadelphia National Historic Site was the first town in America legally registered by an African American. Free Frank McWorter, a formerly enslaved man who bought freedom for himself, his wife and his son, established New Philadelphia in 1836 and sold lots to buy freedom for more family members, according to Kaye Iftner, president of the New Philadelphia Association. It’s a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting the site. At its height, New Philadelphia had 100 multi-racial residents, then it declined and became farmland. The area was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2022.
The New Philadelphia Association has placed a kiosk, signs and walking trail that uses a virtual reality app there. According to missingparkhistory.org, the site’s “interpretive materials” have been flagged for review. Like the Race Riot Monument, it will take years before the NPS fully develops the site. The federal government’s oversight orders have “greatly slowed” that timeline, Iftner says.
Every new park has always had to create foundation documents that outline its mission and significance. These were completed for New Philadelphia around the time the Restoring Truth and Sanity orders were released, so “then NPS had to re-review everything to see how it would or wouldn’t fit with the orders,” according to Iftner. “It has to be reviewed at a bunch of different levels at the NPS.” A year later, she says they are still waiting for a response about the documents.
Spears, with the NPCA, say he’s not concerned about smaller park sites being dismantled, but worries they could be hurt by “deliberate withholding of funding and staff.” He says a key sign is if the 1908 Monument and New Philadelphia Site receive funding in the NPS’s 2027 fiscal year.
Ward doubts that will happen. When he retired last July, the 1908 Monument didn’t have a budget from NPS, he says.
“I don’t know that any new park in the system will get funded,” he said, due to limited monies and staff across the national park system. “There’s very little capacity to focus on anything other than operations and whatever is being asked of park staff by the federal administration.”
Park advocates, historians’ groups, legal scholars and local governments are among those fighting the situation at national parks. Some have filed lawsuits to have deleted materials restored, with varying success. Democratic U.S. Reps. Sharice Davids and Dan Goldman introduced the Truth in National Parks Act. It would prevent the secretary of the interior from removing materials that are “historically and culturally accurate” and require that “historically and culturally accurate interpretive or educational materials removed, obscured or edited after January 20, 2025” be “replaced or restored,” according to congress.gov.
Local historic programming “inclusive, honest”
Meanwhile, annual History Comes Alive programs at historic sites in Springfield this summer are committed to “highlighting people whose contributions haven’t always been centered” in an “honest, inclusive and engaging way,” according to a Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau (SCVB) press release.
Darrin Thurman, SCVB tourism manager, says our country’s anniversary inspired organizers to look at history with a wider lens. “Springfield will always attract visitors who come to explore the life and legacy of Lincoln, and that will always be central to who we are. But when visitors can see a broader range of experiences, from well-known leaders to everyday residents, it deepens their understanding of what America has been and who helped build it.”
Among standard offerings such as the Lincoln Tomb flag lowering ceremony and Abraham and Mary Lincoln “meet and greets” at the Lincoln Home, new presentations include one about African American William H. Butler, a caretaker at the Old State Capitol in the mid-1800s.
“He used that proximity to state leaders to support the causes he was involved in – Friends to Humanity, the Colored Baptist Association and the Colored Citizens of Illinois,” says Thurman.
To learn more, visit: https://visitspringfieldillinois.com/Landing/HistoryComesAlive.aspx.
This article appears in June 4-10, 2026.
