Trump Is Pillaging National Parks to Fund His Pet Projects

Toyota was let off the hook for $40 million in customer refunds, the DHS has held two teenagers for nearly a year, and even Trump voters are turning on him over gas prices

Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump is draining $90 million in national park entry fees to fund a $1.6 million fireworks show and a $76 million paint job on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau killed the $40 million settlement Toyota owed customers after a lobbyist emailed for help. Two Honduran siblings have been held in a Virginia facility for over 300 days despite a fully approved sponsor waiting to take them in. And Trump voters are furious after the president said he’s “in no hurry” to end the Iran war, even as gas tops $6 a gallon.

Before we dive in: AlterNet runs on readers, not advertisers, not billionaires, and not a broadcast license anyone in Washington can threaten to pull. That independence is the only reason we can tell you exactly where your park fees are going. If you want this work to continue, become a paid subscriber today.

Now, let’s dive in.

Trump Is Spending Yellowstone’s Money on Fireworks

Turns out, “America First” doesn’t include America’s parks.

The Trump administration teed up a lavish celebration for America’s 250th anniversary, then discovered the bill was more than the White House could chew. So officials are diverting roughly $90 million away from the National Parks Service, according to internal documents.

Entry fees to the most popular parks in the country, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, will now bankroll America 250 projects. That includes a $1.6 million fireworks display, which costs more than five times what Washington normally spends on the Fourth of July.

It also includes $76 million for repairs to the capital’s monuments. The National Parks Service already faces a $24 billion funding backlog and a mountain of deferred maintenance, so the money is being pulled from one place to pour into another.

The numbers also reveal how Trump lowballs his vanity projects. He promised the Reflecting Pool restoration would cost around $1.8 million. The Interior Department then announced it would pay $13.1 million to a firm Trump picked because they’d worked on his golf club’s swimming pools. The latest documents put the Reflecting Pool figure at $76 million.

Fireworks also release chemicals into the air and are often the cause of wildfires. In other words, Trump is using money from the National Parks budget to buy millions worth of pollutants.

One Lobbyist Wiped Out $48M in Toyota Customer Refunds

Getting out of a $40 million debt has never been easier — if you have the right friends.

Four days into Russell Vought’s tenure as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an old Capitol Hill colleague turned lobbyist emailed him about Toyota. The automaker had signed a 2023 settlement with the CFPB and wanted out.

Three months later, it got its wish.

Toyota had agreed to pay a $12 million fine and refund $48 million to customers who said they’d been duped into unwanted maintenance and insurance plans. When people called to cancel, they were routed to a “retention hotline” and had to ask three times before being told they could only cancel in writing.

Vought ended the settlement early, saving Toyota roughly $40 million it still owed customers, according to records from a Sierra Club lawsuit. Staff attorneys say he signed a termination order expressly ending “any obligations” to make the refunds.

It was one of more than three dozen cases the CFPB abandoned over 15 months. Two-thirds of the canceled settlements involved companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue.

A penalty against a fintech backed by Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen was cut by 98%. A lawsuit against a client of Pam Bondi’s brother was dismissed. An investigation closed after Donald Trump Jr. joined the company’s board.

The people who buried these settlements are counting on you never finding out which others got the same treatment, which companies had their obligations quietly erased, and which lobbyist emails never made the news. Become a subscriber and make sure they’re wrong.

The DHS Has Held Two Honduran Kids For Almost a Year

In October, the federal government decided two Honduran children were safe to release. Then it changed its mind. Then it changed its mind again.

Two Honduran siblings, a 16-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl fleeing gang violence, have been unlawfully detained at a youth facility in Virginia for more than 300 days, the ACLU alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

A close family friend stepped forward to sponsor them when they arrived in July 2025. By October, federal officials had completed a positive home study and background checks, and recorded that “no documents are pending.”

Then, instead of releasing the children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement “repeatedly” reopened the sponsorship process over minor clerical details, the lawsuit alleges. The siblings have documented educational accommodation plans and need specialized developmental services. They are not receiving them while in custody.

The average stay for an unaccompanied minor in ORR custody has jumped from 30 days in 2024 to 117 days in 2025. These two have been waiting nearly three times that. At this rate, they’ll be adults before anyone lets them go home.

Fox News Viewers Are Done Waiting as Gas Tops $6 a Gallon

Even the president’s own base is losing patience.

After an interview conducted by daughter-in-law Lara Trump aired on Fox News last weekend, viewers weren’t buying his explanation for why the war — and the prices — drag on. The president said his main focus is making “a good deal” on the Iran war.

“I’m in no hurry,” he said. “I’d like to say I’m in a hurry because, you know, gasoline prices are gonna come tumbling down, but if you are gonna be in a hurry, you’re not gonna make a good deal.”

Viewers made their feelings known in the comments. . “He’d like to say he’d help Americans, but he chooses not to,” one wrote on X. Another noted the obvious problem: “You can’t make a deal with a Country that isn’t even talking to you.”

Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggered what the International Energy Agency called the largest supply disruption in the history of oil markets, pushing crude as high as $112 a barrel in April. Gas briefly fell when a ceasefire looked possible, then reversed as hostilities deepened.

Oil made up about 51% of the price of a gallon of gas in 2025, so when crude climbs, the pump follows. Gas hit over $6 a gallon in Los Angeles in June. Not everyone can afford to wait for a good deal.

Nobody Owns This Newsletter but You

There is no FCC license attached to AlterNet America. No regulator can threaten our broadcast rights, because we don’t have any. No billionaire can buy us and quietly soften the coverage, because there is no one to sell to.

The only people we answer to are the readers who pay for this. That model is rare, and it is getting rarer. The outlets that cover stories like a $76 million paint job or two kids stuck in a facility for 300 days are exactly the ones under the most financial pressure.

If you believe this work should keep going, the way to guarantee it is simple. Become a paid subscriber today.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Senate Republicans Move to Strip Funding From Trump’s Ballroom. Senate Republicans have quietly killed the $1 billion earmark for Trump’s proposed White House ballroom, stripping it from the budget reconciliation bill unveiled Wednesday. The project had been a personal priority for Trump, who spent weeks lobbying Republican senators to keep the funding in. The whole thing took on new urgency after an armed man tried to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton in April, which is apparently what it takes to make the case that the president needs a bigger room to throw parties in.

Maryland-Born Woman Gets Her Passport as DHS Drops Its Removal Case. Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, a 23-year-old born in Maryland, received her passport on Monday after a six-month battle with the Department of Homeland Security. She was stopped by ICE leaving a Baltimore Taco Bell in December 2025, detained, and transferred five times across Baltimore, Louisiana, Texas, and New Jersey before her attorneys got her home in January. On May 27, DHS filed to dismiss the removal proceedings. Her attorney called the saga a “shot across the bow,” proof that “you are only legal until the government says otherwise.”

American dads are working less and parenting more. A new study finds that college-educated fathers have cut their paid work hours by six per week since the pandemic and redirected that time toward childcare and housework, which researchers are calling one of the biggest generational shifts in how men divide their days. The most direct cause is remote work: when fathers stopped commuting, they were suddenly home for school pickups and lunch with toddlers. The shift is apparently accelerating faster than even the “quiet revolution” of the late 1960s through 1990s.

US Adult Cigarette Smoking Rate Hits Another All-Time Low. Just 1 in 11 American adults said they were current smokers last year, dropping the rate to 9%, according to CDC survey data released this week from more than 24,200 respondents. That’s a long fall from the mid-1960s, when 42% of adults smoked, driven by taxes, smoking bans, and public education campaigns. This comes even as the Trump administration eliminated the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health and its “Tips from Former Smokers” campaign, which alone helped more than 1 million Americans quit.