As the spring season slowly turns into summer, many people plan their upcoming trips.  They dream of hiking trails in national parks, paddling through our public lands on the rivers, planning out a campsite for a family weekend in the national forest, or even booking some spots on a shuttle bus.

And the site they’ll use to book these sites? More than likely, they’ll use Rec.gov, where a person can  “reserve experiences at over 3,600 facilities and 103,000 individual sites across the country” and hard to avoid for the majority of our public lands in 2021 that requires reservations, permits, or booking resources.

Despite the .GOV  designation of the website, rec.gov, is a government domain but run by a private entity contracted by the federal government.  The company controlling access to much of our public lands? Booz-Allen-Hamilton (BAH).  A $7 billion (yes, with a “B”) a year company based in D.C. and famously called the “World’s most profitable spy organization“ by Bloomberg.  You may know one of their more famous employees by the name of Edward Snowden. 

No doubt the BAH connection gets obscured on the rec.gov website for a reason. Many otherwise well-read people active outdoors aren’t aware that the site where they book their weekends and dream vacations funnel funds to a corporation to the tune of a $184 million contract and $1.5 million to implement. All these facts contrary to whatever corporate spin-doctoring is on the BAH site about a private-corporate partnership at no cost to the taxpayers.

In addition to many surcharges for booking shuttles, entrance to the parks, campground reservations, backcountry permits, etc., online, many land agencies are outright limiting or even stopping walk-in or day of passes. Do you want to play? You need to pay BAH their cut first.    BAH gets to set their fees with no oversite and continues to get their fingers in more of the public land pie.

Are you signing up for the lottery to Half-dome, rafting down a river, or backpacking in a choice area?  But still don’t get in? You lose your money regardless if you win or not. And there’s absolutely no incentive to limit the lotteries. There’s an incentive to have MORE lotteries.

Going with the theme of dealing in a cut to an entity with little oversight, BAH’s motto may as well be “F*** you. Pay me.”

The money does not maintain public lands, and I doubt it goes to the people working the customer service lines.

It goes into the corporate circle of life for any high-end DC firm –

• Underfund govt agencies with lobbyists talking to bought and sold politicians.
• Convince the public that the private market will work more efficiently than the now crippled agency.
• Use the lobbyists to convince the bought and paid for politicians to privatize aspects of a government agency.
• Profit. A lot.

The Internal Revenue Service is an infamous example of this well-used game plan.

I should also add that many places, such as Canyonlands National Park, had an efficient and effective online system for permits. Joan and I booked many trips using the government portal with no additional fees.  Due to cutbacks, the park service does not have the staff to manage that portal and got forced to switch to the BAH portal instead.  A similar story this year for the popular Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park, too.

There’s a persistent neoliberal (free market capitalists) myth the free-market and private initiative is always more efficient than government agencies.

Nonsense.

I’ve worked in corporations most of my adult life. They are not more efficient except when it comes to maximizing profits for shareholders and high-level executives and squeezing employees out of their free time for a salary with less purchasing power with each passing year.

And is it free-market capitalism when the rules are rigged for them and agencies crippled? Or more like the mafia dons I mentioned above but with an army of lawyers and lobbyists rather than Vinny and Rocco with a Molotov cocktail and a baseball bat?

NASA, at its peak, when politically expedient, took the lead in engineering our space program in true public-private partnership. Even today, with less funding, they manage to inspire wonder and delight among millions of people beyond internet access for the affluent.  And despite the mythology of the internet creation, where you read these articles is primarily because of government initiative and infrastructure.

On a more prosaic level, despite the “best” efforts of recent administrations, the USPS works well (for now).  I love their electronic signature service, the “click and ship” portal, informed delivery, and other aspects of the website that work efficiently with an easy-to-use design.

A real free market with consumer choices gave me a reliable truck, provides my paycheck and the efficiency of private businesses I know, among others.

I don’t want a private entity to manage our lands in many ways, especially when they manage it through political assignations and corruption and not free-market forces.

To paraphrase a popular bon mot, while I don’t want Uncle Sam running McDonald’s, I certainly don’t want McDonald’s running Rocky Mountain National Park.

BAH running access to public lands  (and their closely aligned evil twin of Reserve America) is awful for many reasons in addition to what I wrote above:

• The $6 f