It just gets worse. We're taking much needed money out of our National park services to fund Trump's pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey party for his base and GOP donors? Great.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">SCOOP: Park Service has diverted $2.5 million in fees --normally used to improve parks around the country -- for Trump's July Fourth extravaganza as White House hands out VIP tickets to donors and Trump's campaign staff, W/<a href="https://twitter.com/jdawsey1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jdawsey1</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/DanLamothe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DanLamothe</a> <a href="https://t.co/zRsCtifxrW">https://t.co/zRsCtifxrW</a></p>— Juliet Eilperin (@eilperin) <a href="https://twitter.com/eilperin/status/1146198771132448769?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 2, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Odds are 10:1 you don't have a clue what the NPS wastes or spends money on. It's language like this that you use that irks the **** out of most here. "Much needed..." Ohhh, the drama Tibs!

The NPS spent $65,473 to figure out what bugs do near a lightbulb
The National Park Service forked over $5,000 to Mars Hill University so it could make a documentary film about a local musician
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...rk-service-as-treasured-monuments-deteriorate
The National Park Service has a massive backlog of maintenance projects it cannot afford to address even as it continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring thousands of additional acres of new park land that has drawn little interest from the public.
A lengthy report on the Park Service released Tuesday by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., found that the service intends to spend $30 million over five years just to plan the agency's centennial anniversary.
Coburn believes the Park Services is plagued by wasteful spending, and his report cites examples, including $17.3 million for "Heritage Partnership Programs" that include a wine-tasting train in Ohio, and an "Autopalooza" automotive heritage show in Southeast Michigan.
Then there is the $15 million the Park Service spent on D.C. area concert venues like Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., which generates up to $30 million in revenue every year. The Park Service spent $731,000 on a seven-year inspection of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to detect stains, and that didn't include any money to clean them.
The agency, meanwhile, is drowning in deferred maintenance on parks and monuments that totals $11.5 billion and is hindering the public use of some of the nation's more popular attractions...
Meanwhile, the Park Service keeps buying land.
The federal government, according to the report, is planning to purchase 1,366 acres to add to Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park at a total cost of $107 million, and plans to scoop up three acres in the Virgin Islands for $2.77 million, among other purchases.
The overall park service budget is $3 billion annually, with $2.58 derived from congressional appropriations.
One area of potential Park Service waste involves the designation of historic sites that few people visit, but which cost millions to maintain and operate.
There is the Philadelphia row house where "wounded Polish freedom fighter" Thaddeus Kosciuszko lived for nine months. It barely gets six visitors a day and costs $352 an hour in federal tax dollars to operate.
Taxpayers also foot the annual $545,000 tab to maintain the Charles Pickney National Historic Site. It's an old farmhouse that researchers learned was built four years after the death of Pickney, a signer of the Constitution. It was designated a historic site after an unnamed senator from South Carolina pushed it through to stop a developer from building new houses on the land.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/co...ng-while-parks-themselves-fall-into-disrepair
Taxpayers shell out $52,000 a year to maintain the home of Black History Month founder Carter Woodson. Yet the tiny, dilapidated row house in northwest Washington D.C., with a "No Trespassing" sign and iron bars blocking the front door and windows hasn’t seen a visitor in the seven years since the National Park Service bought it for $2.1 million and designated it a National Historic Site.
His report documents a federal agency that is top heavy with bureaucracy and management, but badly mangles its spending priorities.
"This is an agency that spends $650 million a year administering a $2.6 billion budget," says Coburn -- a ratio he calls, "outlandish."
His report cites dozens of cases of waste. The Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in the San Francisco Bay area, for example, averages less than 10 visitors a day. "With nine employees, the National Park Service often has more staff working the grounds, than daily visitors," the report says.
The NPS spends about $267K annually to restore and repair neon signs an old hotel signs on Route 66.
$2.2 million – From the National Park Service to pay for concerts and theater performances in the Washington DC area. The Park Service has asked Congress repeatedly to eliminate the earmark that funds the programs, but they were ignored.
Congress devoted $350,000 to the Paterson Great Falls National Historic Park (in New Jersey) which the National Park Service said should not be a federal park.
The federal government owns approximately one-third of all U.S. land. It does not need more land and it could be argued that it should not own 80% of Nevada and Alaska, and more than half of Idaho. That said, it wants to spend $2.3 billion to purchase more land and the National park Service currently has a backlog of maintenance tasks totaling $5 billion. These include parks that the Obama administration was saying would all have to be closed down because of a sequester reduction of a mere 1.2% of all federal spending.
Rage on Tibor. I suspect spending $2.5Million to celebrate America is far more worthy an expenditure than spending the money on discovering dirt, studying bugs drawn to lights, and keeping parks open that Americans don't visit.