Widespread office closures...

Trump targets national parks by announcing widespread office closures

By Sam Hill

The Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park isn’t what you’d expect from a national park site. There are no mountain ranges, no glistening lakes and no awe-inspiring canyons. It’s actually in the heart of Seattle.

The museum sits on an unassuming downtown street corner and is dedicated to Seattle’s role in the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, when Seattle became the “Gateway to the Gold Fields.” It was the only place for the tens of thousands of gold seekers to prepare for the journey north, changing the city forever in the process.

The Klondike gold rush has long been an overlooked part of Pacific Northwest history, but the stories of those miners and entrepreneurs have been kept alive by the museum since it opened in 1979, with about 60,000 people visiting yearly since it moved to its current location in the historic Cadillac Hotel in 2006.

But the future of the museum is uncertain.

This museum and 32 other National Park Service facilities are set to have their leases canceled by October due to cut federal costs, according to a document released by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California.

Separately, the General Services Administration released a list on Tuesday that included 443 “non-core properties” slated for disposal, including Department of the Interior and congressional offices, U.S. Geological Survey locations and Park Service buildings totaling over 2 million square feet of office space. The list has since been removed from the GSA website and is labeled as “coming soon.”

A notice above the GSA list said the properties were identified for disposal because they “are not core to government operations.” 

“Selling ensures that taxpayer dollars are no longer spent on vacant or underutilized federal spaces. Disposing of these assets helps eliminate costly maintenance and allows us to reinvest in high-quality work environments that support agency missions,” the GSA notice stated.

In a separate notice, the GSA claimed that culling the listed properties could “[save] more than $430 million in annual operating costs.” The announcement follows weeks of the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump campaign donor, slashing budgets across the federal government through their Department of Government Efficiency program.

Huffman said in a news release last week that these cuts would deeply hurt the country.

“The federal government exists to serve the people — not abandon them. But Trump and Musk are taking a wrecking ball to our country — slashing staff, cutting vital funding, and creating widespread chaos and economic devastation,” Huffman said in the release. “Shuttering these physical locations goes hand in glove with DOGE’s ‘destroy the government’ approach, and it will make their illegal cuts even more challenging to reverse.”

The 33 Park Service building leases targeted for cancelation, according to Huffman’s list, include an information center in Fairbanks, Alaska, that serves as a hub for millions of visitors a year, the Park Service’s Archaeological Center that houses over 8 million artifacts for dozens of national park sites in Tallahassee, Florida, and a law enforcement facility in San Antonio, Texas. The document lists a range of lease cancellation dates starting as early as July of this year.

There’s no indication as to why these buildings were selected and no mention of what staff can expect as those lease cancellation dates creep closer.

One thing is for certain: The closing of this many Park Service buildings will have a ripple effect throughout the agency. Seattle’s Klondike gold rush museum also serves as the base of operations for other Park Service sites in the Seattle area, including the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, which means the lease cancellation could affect how the memorial is managed.

Theresa Pierno, the president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a Monday press release that closing the offices is “reckless and short-sighted.”

“These closures will cripple the Park Service’s ability to operate parks safely and will mean millions of irreplaceable artifacts will be left vulnerable or worse, lost. Quite simply and astonishingly, this is dismantling the National Park Service as we know it, ranger by ranger and brick by brick,” Pierno said.

The Park Service’s Office of Communications did not respond to inquiries from SFGATE about the GSA list or give details on the affected properties.

The GSA has outlined its general plan for these properties, explaining that they will either be sold, transferred to a different federal agency or used for homelessness assistance.