Donald Trump has nominated the hospitality executive Scott Socha – whose company once sued to claim trademark rights to the name “Yosemite National Park” – to lead the National Park Service.

The nomination of an outsider with business ties to the agency he’d oversee comes at a pivotal moment for the service, which lost a quarter of its staff under Doge’s civil sector purge and which has been the subject of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to erase mention of historical events from NPS sites that portray Americans in an unfavorable light, such as slavery.

US national parks have historically been overseen by people with experience in conservation and land stewardship, with nominees over the past three decades typically emerging from within the agency ranks.

Socha, by contrast, spent the last 27 years working at Buffalo-based Delaware North, a food and hotel management company that provides hospitality services in seven national parks and runs lodging operations in five national park gateway communities, according to the company’s website.

Socha has overseen the development of enterprises in and near national parks since 2017. His nomination requires Senate confirmation.

“The private park concessionaire executive [Scott] Socha has zero experience in public service or conservation,” Save our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill wrote in a statement. “Instead, he’s made a career out of extracting maximum profit from our national parks, not protecting them, making it abundantly clear he’ll be doing the bidding of special interests and corporate interests.”

Delaware North is well known in conservationist circles for a trademark lawsuit involving Yosemite national park. After the company lost a $2bn bid to renew its contract to operate Yosemite’s hotels and restaurants to competitor Aramark in 2016, Delaware North sued, arguing that the company held intellectual property rights to various names used at the park worth more than $50m – including the terms “Yosemite National Park”, “Ahwahnee Hotel” and “Curry Village”.

Those landmarks were briefly renamed, until the lawsuit was settled in 2019.

“Senators must approach this nomination with the utmost skepticism given Scott Socha’s history and the current state of our national parks,” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities, wrote in a statement.

“Our public lands belong to all Americans, not the concessionaires who try to trademark and cash in on the names of our nation’s crown jewels.”