President Trump's long-awaited infrastructure plan and FY19 budget proposal carry few dollars for the National Park System's $11.6 billion maintenance backlog and significant "poison pills" that could lead to environmental harm across the country, according to park and environment advocates.

"Trump’s infrastructure plan is nothing more than a scam to roll back environmental and health protections. It will allow his administration to unilaterally build pipelines across our national parks and sell-off our public lands to oil and coal companies," said Ben Schreiber, senior political strategist with Friends of the Earth. "This comes as no surprise from an administration that gutted Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante and opened huge swaths of our land and oceans to mining and drilling."

While Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke last week expressed strong belief that the administration's proposed Public Lands Infrastructure Fund could generate as much as $18 billion for battling the parks' maintenance backlog, details on how the fund would operate and its dependence on oil and gas lease revenues raised skepticism among onlookers at the National Parks Conservation Association.

The secretary's long-professed desire to see that park system's maintenance backlog reduced, if not wiped out, and President Trump's more than year-long pledge to push through a $1.5 trillion infrastructure campaign, had generated some optimism that the backlog would finally get some serious attention. But between the budget and infrastructure documents, relatively little federal funding was proposed to address the backlog, and it was packaged with language that would hamstring, if not skirt around, key environmental laws and regulations.

NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act that requires scrutiny of projects that could impact the environment, such as the Keystone XL pipeline or the Pebble mine proposed next to Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska, would be placed within a 21-month window for conducting studies such as environmental impact statements that examine the risks of environmental damage. Such studies around Keystone XL ran into seven years.

"As far as the infrastructure part of the package, I'm sure you've already seen that a lot of it, half of it, has to do with trying to, as they call, 'streamline' (regulations). We're calling it 'steamrolling' NEPA protections," said Laura Loomis, NPCA's deputy vice president of government affairs. "The most glaring, direct assault on the national parks is giving the secretary of Interior the authority to approve natural gas and oil pipelines across national parks and tribal lands."

In Congress, Democratic Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona called the infrastructure proposal "a sheet of tired, Republican talking points that blame everything on basic environmental protections and in the end, do nothing."

Laws such as NEPA, he said, give the public a voice in major projects that can impact their communities.

“Using our environmental planning laws to think about highways and bridges before we build them saves us money in the long run and allows communities to have a voice in the planning process," said Rep. Grijalva.

NPCA also is doubtful how successful the Public Lands Infrastructure Fund would be. While Secretary Zinke has claimed the Obama administration was anti-leasing, Ms. Loomis disagreed.

"There's just not a lot of leasing going on presently," she said. "What I'm reading is that there isn't a lot of leasing money. My understanding is that the Obama administration wasn't anti-leasing. They were allowing leasing. It's just that right now, especially with fracking going on, there just isn't a lot of demand for lease sales."

Ms. Loomis recounted one conversation she had with someone within the oil industry who related that there was plenty of oil and gas coming from existing operations, and with oil prices so low, not a lot of interest in investing in new exploration.

"The oil industry I don't think is rubbing its hands in glee over all this new opportunity to lease," she said.

While that initiative is being viewed questionably, there remains concern that funding for the National Park Service simply isn't enough to stay current on maintenance needs, let alone eat away at the backlog.

At the Pew Charitable Trusts, Marcia Argust, who oversees the Restore America's Parks initiative, pointed out that the president's budget proposal represents a 7 percent decrease in funding for the National Park Service, and flat funding for addressing maintenance.

"There was an addendum to the buget that would add a little over $271 million to park operations, so some of that funding likely would go to deferred maintenance," she said. However, how that "would pan out" was unclear, added Ms. Argust.

"As far as the exact implications of the budget recommendations, we'll have to see," she said. "Congress ultimately holds the purse strings."

While Restore America's Parks had hoped to be able to raise concern over the backlog and implement "long-term solutions" that could effectively work to reduce it, Ms. Argust said the president's budget leaves her "hoping to hold steady, as far as deferred maintenance numbers."

"I will just add, as you know, even if we hold steady on deferred maintenance, how (NPS) operations fares (in funding) certainly plays a role. If there's a decrease on operations and staffing, that can certainly have a negative impact on maintenance," she said, "because you need staff to implement contracts and to do project management. We're certainly watching other Park Service accounts."

As far as the president's infrastructure plan, Pew has concerns with it because of some "poison pills" it contains, said Ms. Argust.

"There's some changes to NEPA and existing statutes intended to protect health, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, allowing the secretary authority to authorize pipelines across public lands. Those are just a few of the issues," she said. 

Rather than sit back and take what the Trump administration is proposing, Ms. Argust is hoping Congress can come up with a better approach to addressing the backlog.

"We're interested in working with Congress to shape a reasonable infrastructure package that can move forward," she said.

On that front, news last week that a group of senators and one member of the House would be proposing legislation to address the backlog came somewhat as a surprise, in that a year ago Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Mark Warner, D-Virginia, had introduced legislation to do just that. The latest move by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, and others reportedly irked Sens. Portman and Warner.

Mr. Alexander's proposal, which has yet to be introduced, is expected to have the administration's support.

While the president also left open the door to divesting the federal government of the George Washington and Baltimore Washington parkways - a move that led some to brand Secretary Zinke as a "liar" for having said in the past that he opposed the sale of federal lands -- Ms. Argust couldn't imagine how the Park Service possibly could afford to maintain those parkways without either more funding from Congress or the authority to turn them into toll roads.

"The George Washington Parkway has a backlog of $68 million for its road. The Baltimore Washington Parkway has $33 million in repair backlogs, and they have no way to get any funding from a tolling standpoint to address those needs," she said. "And those roadways have become major commuter thoroughfares."

With the murders perpetrated in a Florida high school by an expelled student and the future of DACA -- Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals -- dominating the headlines and Congress's workload, it likely will be some time before clarity comes to either the Park Service budget or a concrete plan for tackling the maintenance backlog.