House Republicans are examining how the National Park Service has tackled deferred maintenance in the park system/NPS file

Two House subcommittees concerned over why the National Park System's deferred maintenance backlog is not shrinking were scheduled to meet Wednesday with officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Interior Department's Inspector General (IG) to discuss the matter, but no one from the National Park Service.

Heading into the 10:15 a.m. EST meeting — which Park Service officials in Washington say they weren't invited to — staff for the Joint Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and the Subcommittee on Federal Lands portrayed the Park Service as being unable to "monitor its deferred maintenance backlog, leading to inaccurate and unreliable estimations."

"Without proper oversight to ensure the agency appropriately tracks and estimates its backlog, the National Park Service will continue to fail to reduce its deferred maintenance in any meaningful manner," a staff memo [attached below] in advance of the meeting said.

But National Parks Conservation Association staff disagree and cited a GAO report [attached below] released Monday that stated the Park Service and other land-management agencies "faced challenges to reducing deferred maintenance, such as construction supply chain issues and inflation, which raised costs and delayed projects."

Deferred maintenance has been a huge issue for the Park Service, as well as for the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Education.

The Park Service in years past has pointed out that the park system "has extensive preventive and recurring maintenance needs resulting from aging infrastructure and heavy use which often exceeds the capacity for which it was designed. Funding related to maintenance is insufficient to keep pace with needs, which means maintenance is delayed adding to the backlog and resulting in compounding costs."

Back in 2018 writers and editors for the National Parks Traveler produced a long-running series of stories chronicling problems created by the backlog, which at the time was estimated to amount to nearly $12 billion in needed repairs. That series found trails long closed to hikers, leak-prone water pipelines critical to human safety, bridges in dire need of repairs if not replacement, weary sewer systems that can't handle demands, historic structures at risk of serious deterioration, and lodges that unfit for habitation.

In 2020, Congress passed and President Trump signed into law the Great American Outdoors Act, which queued up $6.5 billion to be doled out in $1.3 billion annual payments for five years for the Park Service to use in tackling backlogged maintenance work. That annual GAOA funding has been spread across the park system to address needed projects.

Then, about two years ago, the Park Service announced that it had changed the way it calculated the cost of deferred maintenance, and that change caused the dollar amount to skyrocket, from $12.8 billion in 2019 to nearly $22 billion in 2022. At the time the agency said the new tracking system "is more consistent with modern day industry standards, and it streamlines how the NPS evaluates and collects information providing a more complete understanding of deficiencies and repair needs nationwide." 

Additionally, the Park Service added a "35 percent markup to deferred maintenance estimates for non-transportation assets to account for project execution costs (such as design, construction management, compliance, and project management). NPS’s previous assessment methodology only considered construction costs."

The GAO report mentioned the changes made by the Park Service and the other agencies in tracking deferred maintenance.

"We determined that the data were sufficiently reliable for the purpose of describing general trends in the agencies’ recorded deferred maintenance," the report noted, adding that the land-management agencies were "generally" following leading practice standards developed by the National Research Council in deciding how to spend the money. Those practices involved how the agencies selected and prioritized deferred maintenance projects to tackle.

The GAO also said deferred maintenance costs increased for each of the land-management agencies between 2019 and 2022. It noted that costs increased due to supply chain and inflation issues, the remote location of some projects, extreme weather, and "challenges related to limited contractor capacity and limited competition—specifically, not having enough contractors to bid on or perform the work..."

The House memo, however, questions whether a change in calculating deferred maintenance was key in the roughly doubling of the dollar figure reported in 2022 by the Park Service.

"... while a methodology change could explain a portion of the increase in backlog, it does not explain the full extent of the backlog increase. The largest increase in the NPS backlog, from $14.37 billion in 2020, the year GAOA was passed, to $21.8 billion in FY 2021, occurred the year before the new methodology was put into place. Between FY 2021 and FY 2022, the year the agency implemented its methodology change, the backlog only increased by $500 million," the memo stated.

The House memo also references an Inspector General's report that came out last fall and which stated that the Park Service can't successfully manage its multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog "due to inaccurate and unreliable data" that has made it impossible to accurately state the cost of the backlog. 

"Even though its identified number of assets remained relatively constant, the NPS’s deferred maintenance cost estimate has continuously increased from $11.3 billion in FY 2016 to $20 billion in FY 2021," the IG report noted. "The NPS has cited multiple factors that contributed to this increase, including application of a blanket 35 percent markup to its FY 2021 deferred maintenance estimate, which increased its estimate by an additional $3.7 billion that year for a total of $23.7 billion. We found, however, that there was not sufficient documentation demonstrating whether the amount of the markup was reasonable. We also found that the NPS’ broad application of the markup may lead to inaccurate estimates depending on whether work is completed by staff or contractors." 

At the time, Park Service Director Chuck Sams said the IG report "fails to acknowledge improvements NPS has made to obtain more complete, timely, and consistent estimates of facility condition that can be used in identifying needs and targeting investments. Though the NPS had identified and acknowledged many of the issues and data management challenges discussed in the OIG's draft report, and appreciates the OIG team's efforts and professionalism, the lack of consideration for the implementation of planned improvements during the engagement period has largely resulted in a set of conclusions and recommendations that are no longer valid nor relevant in the context described within the report."

Mike Murray, chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, and Kristen Brengel, vice president of government affairs for NPCA, at the time agreed with the Park Service that the IG report was flawed.

"I think it's important to note that the OIG report reviewed past practices related to NPS management of the DM [deferred maintenance] situation (as it existed between FY2016-2021). It is not an accurate depiction of the current situation, as six of the report's eight recommendations have already been resolved by the NPS," said Murray. "I do think it makes sense that the NPS should develop additional guidance for estimating the cost of maintenance projects, particularly regarding the use of a standard mark-up in cost estimates. While the report considers this one of two 'unresolved' recommendations, the NPS is already in the process of addressing this."

While the House memo acknowledged the new GAO report as it applied to the Park Service, it said the report "failed to mention obvious mismanagement and lack of reliable information which has led to the ever-growing deferred maintenance backlog."

"NPS has stated that the agency needs roughly $1 billion to address preventative and recurring maintenance 'just to keep the portfolio of assets at a steady state. However, GAO highlighted that, in the past two years, NPS has received more than $3 billion to address its deferred maintenance, yet the backlog rose by nearly $8 billion," the memo pointed out. "While inflation and supply chain issues have also generally increased costs, the increase in the deferred maintenance backlog has also outpaced increases in inflation. For example, while the report noted that construction material costs increased by 42 percent, NPS’s backlog increased by more than 75 percent. These issues are ultimately attributable to the Biden administration’s own reckless spending and burdensome regulatory agenda, which has exacerbated both inflation and supply chain issues."

On Tuesday, John Garder, NPCA's senior director for budget and appropriations, defended the Park Service's handling of GAOA funds.

"We've seen hundreds of successful projects all around the country in almost all 50 states benefiting more than 200 congressional districts. And by the time the five years of funding is over, we expect parks in all the states to benefit," Garder told the Traveler during a phone call. "The funding is clearly being spread out across the country. And parks large and small, including projects large, small and medium sized and there's clearly a record of success executing these projects. And neither the inspector general nor the GAO found any issues with project execution.

"... The Park Service has not been able to keep up with fixed costs and has steadily been losing staff while visitation goes up, and that makes it challenging to keep up with maintenance," he added. "The Park Service's estimate of the backlog has increased because of the refinement of their methods, which the IG investigated prematurely, and which the GAO report found to be responsible and transparent. The backlog cannot be decreased overnight when these projects take a long time to execute from the obligation of those funds to the completion of those projects and the review of those projects before they can be taken off the books. There are some projects that are being completed, there are many underway, and we will see those projects getting taken off the books in the coming months and years."