Updated 3:30 p.m. Tuesday
Earlier this month, a giant bust of Elon Musk — accompanied by the words “Make America Wait Again: Now With Longer Lines Thanks To DOGE Cuts!” — appeared in Utah’s Arches National Park, towed on a trailer behind a truck driving through the park.
Now, the Musk bust has appeared again — this time in Yosemite National Park.
Visitor Greg Perkins told KQED that he spotted the sculpture, which makes reference to the Tesla CEO and former Department of Government Efficiency leader’s attempts to reduce the staff and budgets of federal departments like the National Parks Service, in Yosemite this weekend — and captured photos of the giant head passing iconic park spots like Yosemite Falls and El Capitan. According to Outside magazine, the head spotted in Arches was 12 feet high.
Scott Carr, Director of Communication for Yosemite National Park, confirmed that the bust of Musk was indeed present in the park this weekend. Addressing the issue of wait times referenced by the bust’s signage, Carr told KQED by email that “Yosemite National Park is one of the busiest parks in the National Park System and while it is still early in the summer season the park is on pace to surpass last year’s visitation totals of more than 4.1 million visitors.”
“Wait times to enter Yosemite vary daily and throughout the day,” wrote Carr, and “weekends, specifically Friday and Saturday, are the busiest days with peak traffic between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.”
According to the National Parks Conservation Association, permanent staffing at national parks around the United States has fallen 24% since President Donald Trump took office.
National Parks have long been used as sites of protest, including 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square opposite the White House and the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island in the 1960s. In February, Yosemite staffers hung an upside-down United State flag from the face of El Capitan during the park’s annual “firefall” event in protest of the Trump administration’s proposed cuts.
The Trump administration’s policies have taken direct aim at public lands during the president’s first six months back in office, from calls to cut $900 million from the NPS operations budget and attempts to sell U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management properties to private buyers to new signs asking visitors to federal lands to report signage that includes “negative” information about U.S. history.
While the lands sale was ultimately scrapped from Republicans’ budget bill, and most parks funding may remain intact in 2026, top Trump officials still have their eyes on Alcatraz National Park as a future federal prison site.
Some national parks are also struggling not only with low morale around the uncertainty of staffing shortages and underfunding, but also with reported lower visitation as international travel wanes.
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