Last month, without prior approval from Congress or input from the public at large, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a major overhaul of its Forest Service division. Although it’s promoted as “common sense” reform, the move is an effort to transfer control of federal lands to states, thereby creating new opportunities to favor industry priorities for land use — particularly the lumber industry. In response, business leaders in the outdoor recreation sector are allying with recreationists and conservationists to push back.
“Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins said in a statement announcing the reorganization. “Proper forest management means a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber to build homes right here in America.”
The words make clear that this reorganization aims to increase access to public lands for the domestic lumber industry.
Not to be confused with the environmental protection mission of the National Parks Service (a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior), the USDA Forest Service is responsible for managing more than 150 national forests and 20 grasslands. It oversees 193 million acres as a multi-use endeavor that already includes a measure of private sector activities. Still, the agency’s current mission statement emphasizes sustainable practices, calling for “a conservation ethic in promoting the health, productivity, diversity, and beauty of forests and associated lands.”
It also emphasizes “developing and providing scientific and technical knowledge aimed at improving our capability to protect, manage, and use forests and rangelands.”
Despite Rollins’s calming words, the reshuffle is more accurately described as a ticking time bomb in terms of the Forest Service’s ability to balance its twin public conservation and private sector productivity missions. The agency’s workforce was already reduced by an estimated 16 percent — almost 5,900 employees — through U.S. President Donald Trump’s budget-cutting efforts last year, resulting in a significant shortfall in the agency’s routine fire mitigation and trail maintenance work.
Conservationists and recreation stakeholders charge that the new reorganization is nothing less than another mass purge. This time, under the guise of relocating thousands of experienced professionals — who don’t necessarily share the priorities of the Trump administration — with the goal of installing new recruits.
Critics say they foresee very few existing staff relocating based on similar relocation efforts in the past. During Trump’s first term in office in 2019, the Department of the Interior relocated the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado. Roughly 90 percent of the D.C. staff refused the offer to move across the country.
The relocation was reversed just two years later when former U.S. President Joe Biden took office, but the damage was done. “When I led the Bureau of Land Management under President Biden, the hardest part of my job was reassembling the agency after the first Trump administration had scattered its headquarters from our nation’s capital,” recalled Tracy Stone-Manning, who headed BLM during the Biden administration, in a recent opinion piece for the Loveland Reporter-Herald. “The move crippled the agency — as intended.”
If the Forest Service follows a similar path, its staff will be decimated. Rollins expects 260 positions to be relocated from the current Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, more than 2,000 miles away.
The choice of Utah for the new headquarters raised additional red flags among critics. Utah is the epicenter of a Republican-led effort to transfer federal lands to state control. With support from the powerful right wing legislative organization American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the land transfer movement potentially exposes federal property to damaging exploitation and misuse. At times, armed local activists have raised the temperature and the profile of the land transfer movement in Utah and elsewhere.
Adding to the land transfer alarm, Rollins announcement plainly stated her intention to begin “transitioning to a state-based organizational model” that eliminates nine existing Forest Service regional offices and replaces them with 15 new positions, many located in Western states.
“State directors will serve as national leaders,” the announcement reads. Each office includes “a small leadership support team responsible for functions such as legislative affairs, communications and intergovernmental coordination.”
This underscores concerns that new state leaders will follow Trump administration forestry policies, such as rescinding the Roadless Rule to allow road construction and timber harvesting on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands and eliminating public participation requirements for environmental reviews, in lockstep.
Adding fuel to the land transfer fire is the installation of software billionaire and Idaho land owner Michael Boren as the USDA Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment earlier this year. Described as a “walking conflict of interest” by Idaho Democratic Party Chair Lauren Necochea, the Idaho native is known for building an unauthorized airstrip and cabin on public lands, among a series of clashes with Forest Service staff and other public officials.
Additional concerns were raised over the loss of staff and research programs at local Forest Service offices, which could cripple timber management, fire mitigation, pest control, and other research programs that support conservation and private sector use of public lands. The reorganization plan calls for closing 57 of the 77 local research offices. Thousands of positions at those offices will be cut or relocated to a single office in Fort Collins, Colorado. In testimony before Congress, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz admitted that up to 1,100 research positions will be eliminated.
Seen through that lens, the reorganization is part and parcel with the Trump administration’s far-flung war on science, most recently including the abrupt firing of the entire board of the nation’s premier scientific grant-making organization, the National Science Foundation.
This time, however, the administration may be in for a fight. House representatives pointed out that Congressional approval is needed to make the proposed changes to the Forest Service program. While Rollins seems determined to forge ahead regardless of Congress or the law, opposition to the move has already formed among lawmakers, with some Republican members among those voicing skepticism.
The pressure from recreation and conservation stakeholders was also swift and furious. The public lands tracking organization More Than Just Parks, for example, weighed in immediately.
“What this actually is, stripped of the Orwellian window dressing, is the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history,” Jim Pattiz More Than Just Parks co-founder, wrote in the statement. “This is a chainsaw in broad daylight.”
In his own statement, Chief of Staff for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Julian Reyes, called the USDA announcement an “irreversibly destructive” gutting of the Forest Service and its resources, including climate and pest control research and firefighting.
The outdoor recreation media also responded swiftly. The fly fishing publication Hatch Magazine published a widely circulated, point-by-point rebuttal of the USDA’s efforts to defend the move in the face of blowback from conservationists and other public lands stakeholders.
Private sector recreation stakeholders rallied, too, following calls from advocates to use their voices. “Trump just ordered the most devastating dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service in 121 years. The outdoor brands that built their entire business on public lands haven’t said a word. It’s time to change that,” SaveUSFS said in a statement on March 31, the day of the USDA announcement. (SaveUSFS is a project of the organization altNPS, which formed in 2017 to advocate for national parks during the first Trump administration.)
The call was answered. More than 70 outdoor businesses signed a letter by The Conservation Alliance calling to protect public engagement and Forest Service lands. Patagonia, Columbia Sportswear Company, REI Co-op, Black Diamond Equipment, Orvis, Cotopaxi and Nalgene are among the group outdoor companies that made their own public statements echoing that message.
The nine-member coalition of outdoor enthusiast advocacy organizations Outdoor Alliance also weighed in with a statement, noting that the Forest Service has “shifted its focus away from conservation and recreation and toward extraction and development” under the Trump administration.
Outdoor Alliance spent the last 10 years working to permanently protect 40 million acres of public land, converting outdoor enthusiasts into outdoor advocates along the way. Efforts like these are needed now more than ever, lest their work, along with a century’s worth of efforts to conserve federal lands, all goes to waste.
Feature image credit: Forest Service Photography/Wikimedia Commons
