One of Ours

...deterioration of the national parks is an old story, attributable in large part to "park barrel" politics. Over the years, Congress kept adding more parks to the system, which necessitated reducing the funds available to maintain the existing ones. Some of the new parks lived up to their billing as natural or historical treasures. But others were back-door economic development projects for areas in decline. As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 1995, Chatterbox wrote about one particularly glaring example of the latter: Keweenaw National Park in Calumet, Mich., an abandoned mining town whose enticements included slag piles … crumbling commercial buildings … a Superfund site … and, oh yes, a retail complex, whose construction on park grounds seemed to be the main purpose of the exercise. A better-known example is the Steamtown National Historic Site, a glorified railroad museum in Scranton, Pa...

...But the memo to the Northeast region states the Park Service's intention to do precisely the opposite, "so that it won't cause public or political controversy." In pursuing this goal, the park superintendents are instructed never to use the word "cut" publicly to describe the budget, er, reductions:

Randy felt that the issuance of a press release was the most problematic. He suggested that if you feel you must inform the public through a press release on this years [sic] hours or days of operation for example, that you state what the park's plans are and not to directly indicate that "this is a cut" in comparison to last year's operation. If you are personally pressed by the media in an interview, we all agreed to use the terminology of "service level adjustment." ….

This isn't just Orwellian. It's stupid, too, because the laws of physics dictate that memos like this will always get leaked to the press. A silver lining to the Bush administration's secrecy policy, at least as it's carried out at the Park Service, is that it's laughably inept.