Can the Trump Administration Allow Private Development in Yosemite?

The Trump Administration is reportedly considering letting a private Nevada developer take control of a parcel of land in Yosemite National Park. Conservationists and elected officials have pushed back hard, though the Interior Department disputes parts of the reporting. We’ll talk about the consequences of privatizing a cherished landmark and the efforts to stop it.

Guests:

• Anna Kramer, reporter covering government and policy with a focus on energy and environment, NOTUS – broke the story with her article, “Trump Is Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private Developer”
• John Buckley, director, Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center an environmental group that’s worked for 35 years to defend water, wildlife, and wild places of the Northern Yosemite region
• Jared Huffman, U.S. Representative, California’s 2nd congressional district; ranking member, House Natural Resources Committee

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Yosemite has been in government hands since Abraham Lincoln, in 1864, signed a congressional bill to give the valley to the state of California. It became a national park in 1890, about the time that the naturalist John Muir published one of his famous descriptions of Yosemite.

“No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite,” he wrote. “Every rock and its wall seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose, others absolutely sheer or nearly so, for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calm alike, seemingly conscious yet heedless of everything going on about them.”

All things considered, though it was not the first national park — that’s Yellowstone — Yosemite Valley may be the single most important region for inspiring the preservation of lands as public parks for all people to enjoy.

So when our first guest this morning published a story with the headline, “Trump Is Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private Developer,” it touched off a firestorm. This is how the ground. And here to tell us what she found, we’ve got Anna Kramer, a reporter covering government and policy with a focus on energy and environment for the new site, NOTUS. Welcome.

Anna Kramer: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: So let’s just get the basics down here. What has been proposed, and what’s sort of the state that it’s in right now?

Anna Kramer: The proposal is for a small land swap between Yosemite National Park and a private developer. The Trump administration, inside the Interior Department, is currently trying to find a way to give a tiny piece of land within Yosemite just enough to build a quarter-mile stretch of road to a private developer that owns land just outside of Yosemite National Park, an 83-ish-acre undeveloped plot of land.

If they could get that small piece of land, they’d be able to build a road that connects the private property outside the park to a main road within the park. And in exchange, the developer would need to acquire land somewhere else in the state of California that’s worth equivalent value to give to the Park Service to make it a swap.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, it’s interesting, though, because, you know, given the history of Yosemite Valley, it kind of seems impossible to calculate what would actually be some kind of comparable-value piece of land somewhere else.

Anna Kramer: My understanding is that it’s pretty difficult, but the thing that’s important to understand is that the intrinsic importance of Yosemite National Park doesn’t get to go into that consideration.

Anna Kramer: So it’s impossible to value, right, if you think about Yosemite National Park as something that is sort of invaluable. But really what we’re doing here is we’re talking about appraising a piece of land. And you figure out what’s on the land, you figure what it’s worth in the context of what’s around it. And it’s also probably the case that the increase in value of the private property outside the park may not factor much into the valuation of the land that will be exchanged. To the developer, if that makes sense, if this were to go through.

Alexis Madrigal: Interesting. How common are these kinds of land swaps?

Anna Kramer: It depends on what you mean by how common. So with the federal government broadly, they’re quite common, and they’re often very popular because they’re used to try to fix problems that exist with federal government land.

You have these checkerboard patterns that exist across a large part of the American West, where you have private and public land next to each other in really inconvenient ways. And so a land swap that addresses that in a way that sort of expands the value of both the private and public land, sort of to the benefit of everyone, those kinds of land swaps tend to be somewhat popular and happen regularly.

Land swaps within the National Park Service are not nearly so common. Usually, if they do happen on a large scale, they involve Congress in one way or another. What we’re talking about here is not something that needs to involve Congress necessarily.

And when they happen within the Park Service, they’re typically happening because the park has identified a need for a park. You know, the park needs to expand in some way. There’s a piece of extraordinarily valuable land that happens to house endangered species that could use extra protection. The kinds of things, you know, they want to build a new campsite. Those kinds of land swaps tend to be what you see when we see the Park Service pursuing them.

Alexis Madrigal: So wouldn’t, generally speaking, be a private developer getting kind of — these are my words here — a sweetheart deal for a special road to their resort? Who is making the request? And is it a new idea to build this road to this piece of land?

Anna Kramer: So the request currently is coming from this private developer, which is a Las Vegas-based company called Kingsbarn Realty Capital. They purchased this private piece of land outside of Yosemite in 2024 through a web of LLCs. The company itself is not the direct owner. And that purchase was from a previous developer who owned the plot of land for nearly a couple of decades.

The previous developer wanted to build a resort on the land and connect it with a small road to the main part of Yosemite National Park. And the Park Service, under the Bush and Obama administrations, said, no, absolutely not, we’re not going to do that. And they said no so firmly they ended up actually having to defend it in court, both in district court and then again on appeal. And they won.

So the developer had no shot of getting this road built, the previous owner. So then this previous owner sells it to Kingsbarn Realty Capital’s web of LLCs in 2024. Kingsbarn Realty Capital goes to the Park Service under the Biden administration and says, we want to build this road. The Biden administration says, absolutely not. This is a long-dead issue. We’re not considering it.

I spoke to the person who was the superintendent of Yosemite National Park at the time, who said that when she left Yosemite in early 2025, to her, this was obviously never going to happen.

Alexis Madrigal: Hmm. What is the relationship between, say, you know, when we say in this case, like the Biden administration did this, the Trump administration did that, and then we have a Park Service official there? Like, what is the relationship supposed to be, and what is it?

Anna Kramer: Of course. So the way that Park Service is structured is it’s a bureau within the Department of Interior, and then the Department of Interior is led by a Cabinet secretary. In this case, it’s Doug Burgum, who’s a member of President Trump’s Cabinet.

And so the way that this is working currently is the developer reached out to the Department of Interior about trying to pursue this land exchange. And my sources tell me the inside Interior, the political appointees, those who are chosen by Secretary Burgum or someone in the Trump administration, are those who are interested in making this land exchange happen, and they’ve been going to the longtime civil servants who work in the Park Service and telling them, you’ve got to make this happen, or we need to find a way to make it happen, or why isn’t it happening yet?

And then the longtime civil servants are the folks who are responsible for actually doing the tasks that need doing to make it happen, right? So the appraisal of the land to determine how much it’s worth, which is one step that must occur before a land swap, that’s something that has to be done by someone who works at the Park Service who has expertise in that.

Same thing goes for determining what the rules of the land swap are and what the processes are and what happens next. That stuff is all handled by longtime civil servants of the National Park Service.

Alexis Madrigal: Man, there’s so many different questions that rise out of this, but maybe the most important one is just why would the Trump administration be pushing the political appointees within the Department of Interior — that is to say, why would they be pushing on the Park Service to do this? Is it because, have you been able to find evidence of links between those particular people in the Trump administration and this developer, or is it more just a sort of general sense of wanting to be friendly to a developer who seems to have some idea for doing something?

Anna Kramer: That’s something I’d really like an answer to and that I am currently reporting on and trying to find more details about. I think that’s the natural follow-up to this reporting, is to figure out precisely what connection exists, if it does, between the developer and political appointees inside the Interior Department.

I think it’s an important question. Obviously, it’s important to understand what the reasons are that folks inside the Interior Department might be interested in making this happen. And it’s something that I intend to report on moving forward.

What I can tell you is my sources tell me there definitely is, or has been up until now, interest from the Interior Department in finding a way to make this happen.

Alexis Madrigal: Hmm. So I just want to note for everyone listening that we did in fact reach out to the developer, at least the developer’s representative. What has that developer’s representative said to you?

Anna Kramer: Absolutely. So the developer’s representative has said to me that they are eager to pursue this land swap. And the sort of argument in favor of it is that what it would do is cut down the amount of drive time for anyone who’s visiting this private property that Kingsbarn Realty Capital purchased.

So the property is currently quite far from Yosemite National Park, from Yosemite Valley. To get to the property, you have to drive through very long, winding Forest Service roads because the property is located in the Stanislaus National Forest. So the proposal would allow for a short road that would dramatically cut down the drive time.

The developer’s representative says to me, you know, this is actually a really environmentally friendly thing to be doing because you’re literally reducing the pollution that is created in the area when you’re driving a much shorter amount of time than you are a long time.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, here is the greater question rising out of this for me, too. This is, as you said, it’s a fairly small piece of land. And Yosemite Valley itself, the core thing, is also fairly small, right? A mile wide, seven miles long, a tiny thing. Is the idea here that once a private developer is able to get their hooks in, in this new way, that it would spell bad things for the Park Service overall? Or is it really just about preserving the sanctity of Yosemite Valley?

Anna Kramer: It’s both of those things. And it’s also about the National Park Service mission. So I’ll sort of run you through the various problems that people have.

And I will say, we published this story, and the outpouring of responses, of extraordinary emotion, very negative emotion about what it is that the Park Service may do here — we’re still in the early stages of this — was really overwhelming. It’s important to understand just how strong the reaction has been.

So the objections, there’s a couple of them. The first one is that the Park Service’s mission is to protect the parks both for our enjoyment today and unimpaired for future generations.

To those who have worked for the Park Service, to people who defend the national parks as advocates, to conservationists, “unimpaired for future generations” means you really don’t mess with those. You do not cut into those boundaries at all for any reason, no matter what the reason may be.

And it also means that you don’t — it’s not — they don’t consider it to be a very good idea to sort of create more private access to a park that is supposed to be for everyone.

And then on top of that, you have the fear from conservationists that if you do this here in Yosemite, even in one small way, you do open the door to people all across the country saying, wait a minute, why don’t I capitalize on X or Y property near the park? Why can’t I?

Alexis Madrigal: This is no third-tier national park. This is Yosemite, you know?

I just wanted to note for people, we just had a question about where exactly the property is. It’s closest to the Big Oak Flat park entrance on the west side of the park, just for — we’ll come back to this in a sec.

We’re talking about how the Trump administration is reportedly considering allowing a private developer to take control of a quarter-mile strip of land in Yosemite. We’re joined by Anna Kramer, a reporter who broke the story about it at NOTUS. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.