Starting this month, billboards posted along highways in Phoenix and Tucson beckon travelers to visit Arizona’s Saguaro National Park this summer. “Greetings from Saguaro National Park,” they read, but with a caveat.
“Reduced Visiting Hours,” they say, with an asterisk at the end. Just below: “Made possible by D.O.G.E.”
That would be the Department of Government Efficiency, the pseudo-agency of billionaire Elon Musk that has been slashing and burning across the federal government. The country’s national parks haven’t been immune, as the billboards hope to highlight.
Drivers in Phoenix and Tucson will encounter several of these billboards this month.
More Perfect Union
Before Donald Trump took office in January, Saguaro National Park’s two visitor centers were open seven days a week. But in March, thanks to cuts made by DOGE, the park scaled back its hours and closed every Monday.
The billboards were paid for by the progressive organization More Perfect Union, which wants to raise awareness about Trump’s and Musk’s effect on national parks. (Billboards are a popular trolling technique, as Canada showed earlier this year.)
“The purpose of the billboard is to put a name and a villain to the content and degradation of experience that people are feeling,” said Faiz Shakir, the organization’s founder. “There was somebody who decided on this.”
In February, as a result of sweeping federal funding cuts, about a thousand National Park Service workers were fired — or, as Shakir puts it, “hacked and chainsawed out of the federal government for no good reason." Additionally, the Trump administration’s proposed budget would cut more than $1.2 billion from the service and would cede control of some smaller parks to the states.
These cuts mean visitors face longer wait times to get into parks and fewer safety measures to protect against heat illness and other dangers. Parks have more trash and dirtier bathrooms. Cuts to the national park system “set the stage for the ultimate privatization of these lands,” Shakir said, which is “a grave concern to us.”
More Perfect Union has paid for six billboards in Phoenix and four in Tucson. Nationwide, the organization has placed 300 billboards across every major region of the country, including near Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio. Billboards highlight issues specific to the parks they reference, such as rising deaths, shut-down campgrounds, reduced staff or an increased level of trash or danger.
Arizona’s two other national parks, Grand Canyon National Park and Petrified Forest National Park, have also been impacted by cuts. More Perfect Union plans to roll out billboards about the former later this year.
Shakir said his organization’s warning about threats to the parks is a non-partisan one that “crosses ideological spectrums.” Members of both parties can get on board with protecting national parks, which is why Shakir thinks the battle is a winnable one.
“There is a chance you could reverse the tide and change the direction of some of these cuts if we mobilize,” he said. “We've got to keep up the pressure.”
