NOTUS investigation revealed Interior Department pressuring National Park Service to trade Yosemite land to a private developer

NOTUS reported on August 28, 2026, that National Park Service staff in California and Washington, D.C. have spent more than a year, since the spring of 2025, quietly trying to arrange a land exchange between the federal government and a Nevada-based company controlled by real-estate developer Kingsbarn Realty Capital. Under the proposal, the Park Service would give up a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite -- or an easement over it -- in exchange for land of equal value elsewhere in California that has yet to be determined. Kingsbarn owns an adjacent 83-acre parcel just outside the park's western boundary and wants to build a short road connecting it to Yosemite's main thoroughfare, Highway 120, giving the property direct access to the park that its current 10-mile, largely forest-buffered approach does not allow.

Four people directly familiar with the discussions, along with agency documents reviewed by NOTUS, described political pressure from the Interior Department's top leadership on Park Service staff to accommodate Kingsbarn and its lobbyists as "very unusual." The Park Service had received and rejected the same access request from the property's prior owner repeatedly over more than two decades, including under the Bush and Obama administrations. Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year Park Service veteran who served as Yosemite's superintendent until shortly after President Trump's 2025 inauguration, said the agency's basic purpose is "to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit." The San Francisco Chronicle independently confirmed discussions of the arrangement with two officials familiar with the conversations.

Both the National Park Service and Interior said in on-the-record statements that no final decision has been made and that any exchange would go through required environmental review and public-notification processes under federal law. After NOTUS's story published, Lanny Davis, identifying himself as an attorney for Kingsbarn, confirmed the company was pursuing the exchange, describing the proposed road as a limited, non-endangering connector that Interior had agreed was "a pro-environmental decision." Kingsbarn's affiliated LLC purchased the adjacent land, which it markets as "Sanctuary at Yosemite," for $4 million in 2024.