Live updates: Trump’s July 4th celebration – CNN

While President Trump is setting the bar for large crowds on the National Mall tonight, it’s worth noting that the National Park Service will never provide a crowd count for the festivities.

Here’s why: Congress prohibits the Department of the Interior and its agencies from using its funds to crowd count. This has been in place since 1997 — well before Trump lamented coverage of his 2017 Inaugural crowd. 

The 1997 appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior includes a provision saying:

The backstory: The provision came to be following the 1995 Million Man March, when Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue the National Park Service for estimating the crowd at 400,000, according to Jason Alderman, who wrote it as an aide to then-Rep. Sidney Yates.

“At a time when national parks were woefully underfunded with billions of dollars in deferred maintenance (sadly little has changed 20 years later) it felt like a particularly poor use of taxpayer money to have the Park Service count crowds at events on the National Mall,” Alderman wrote in the Huffington Post in 2017, adding, “I was simply motivated to free the Park Service from being a political punching bag and allow them to divert those resources spent on counting to instead be used for improving the parks under their care.”