Under an administration initiative first elaborated two years ago and modified several times since, the Park Service must decide by year's end whether to keep intact its Midwest Archaeological Center in Lincoln, Neb., and its Southeast Archaeological Center, in Tallahassee, or offer most of the jobs for bid to outside contractors.
The two centers between them employ fewer than 100 archaeologists, but with the help of volunteers, cooperative agreements with universities and their own outsourcing, they supervise the care, protection and promotion of national heritage resources at 122 national parks and 780 national historical landmarks in 22 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The word that leaped out at me from this story was "volunteers." We've got people volunteering for a government program to save our precious heritage, and the Republicans want to axe the whole thing. This is exactly the kind of citizen involvement that a truly conservative administration would seek to encourage, not gut. This is so disgusting I can't even think of a snappy headline for how disgusting it is.