Today is Earth Day, and America's national parks are marking the holiday with events encouraging

everyone to enjoy the outdoors. In 2025, U.S. National Parks recorded more than 323 million

visits the most ever. But as parks grow more popular, the Trump administration has proposed

cutting more than a billion dollars from the system, a move that could eliminate

thousands of jobs in an already understaffed workforce and threatened protections across more

than 430 parks nationwide. I spoke recently with Jeff Reinbold, who leads the National Park

Foundation, about the significance of the parks and how to sustain and safeguard them in the

years ahead.

Jeff Reinbold, welcome to the NewsHour. Thank you. Thank you.

So the National Parks Foundation is inviting people to celebrate national parks all month long alongside Earth Month.

How are you thinking about this moment as a chance to reconnect Americans with their parks?

Yeah, April is a big time for national parks.

You get people planning their vacations

and, you know, it's a long-time American tradition

of visiting national parks.

And so this is the perfect year,

particularly with it being the 250th anniversary of the country,

to go out and see these parks and visit them.

You've spent decades working in and around some of the country's most iconic parks and sites,

the Flight 93 Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial.

You mentioned America's 250th anniversary.

What are you hoping people consider and reflect on when they visit parks this year?

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