On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced a wholesale restructuring of the legacy agency. In a move set to prioritize “common sense forest management,” Trump administration officials intend to centralize many Forest Service offices in western states. The reorganization will move Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah. It will also close or repurpose all nine of its regional offices, shutter 74 percent of research and development facilities, and create 15 new state offices.
Three of these state offices will open in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. The Pacific Northwest Research Station, previously based in Portland, is slated for closure alongside research and development centers in Seattle and Wenatchee. Three research labs in La Grande, Corvallis and Olympia will tentatively remain open.
According to officials, the move west is a “structural reset” designed to streamline operations, strengthen local economies and improve mission delivery.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins offered a clear view of the goals of the project in the initial press release.
“President Trump has made it a priority to return common sense to the way our government works,” said Rollins. “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.”
“This includes supporting our timber growers across the country… by prioritizing a regional office and promoting policies that boost timber production, lowering costs for consumers. In the past year we have returned the Forest Service to the leading forestry and fire management organization in the world. Proper forest management means a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber to build homes right here in America.”
Rollins’ statement reflects recent priority shifts in Forest Service policy. After Trump signed Executive Order 14225 in early May of last year—calling for increasing American timber production by at least 25%—the agency began expediting resource production.
As part of this directive, Forest Service leadership encouraged “efficient approaches to meet the minimum requirements” for several longstanding environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act.
The administration first announced agency-wide plans for reorganization via a memorandum published by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brook Rollins in July of last year. The initial proposal received widespread criticism from tribal representatives, conservation groups and Forest Service staffers during a 30-day public comment period — according to the feedback analysis, just over 80 percent of the 14,000 comments received expressed negative sentiment regarding the project.
Criticisms of the Forest Service reorganization made up about a quarter of responses, with commenters expressing apprehension about the agency’s ability to manage lands and resources in the long-term. Stakeholders held that centralized oversight could compromise ecological management and public access and cited concerns about a lack of transparency eroding public trust.
The announcement comes just over a year after Elon Musk’s now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to federal workstaff resulted in the loss of 16 percent of Forest Service employees. In Washington, staff cuts have led to marked reductions in local ranger districts’ ability to maintain trails and other vital infrastructure.
During Trump’s first term in 2020, the Bureau of Land Management underwent a similar overhaul, moving its central office from D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado and relocating regional centers to western states. The shakeup resulted in the loss of roughly 90 percent of the agency’s employees, resulting in an effect critics dubbed a “brain drain” as experts with years of experience left the agency. The Biden administration moved the bureau back to Washington in 2021.
Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns for the Wilderness Society, a nonprofit aimed at protecting federal public lands in the U.S., drew comparisons to BLM’s restructuring in a recent interview with Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting Service.
“The lesson that they learned is this is an awfully effective way to further dismantle and push agency staff out the door. These staff in the headquarters are very seasoned, experienced staff with a lot of institutional knowledge under their belt,” Hicks said. “This really is unprecedented across the board. And this reorganization shouldn’t be viewed in isolation, but should be viewed within the entire pattern that we’re seeing, where they’re just blowing massive holes inside this agency that are really designed to break it.”
Some see the agency’s transfer to Salt Lake as a targeted move. Utah’s political leadership has a long history of action intended to harness more control over millions of acres of public land. Just last year, Utah Senator Mike Lee submitted a plan to sell off millions of acres of federal lands, a proposal that was later dropped following massive public outcry.
Hicks further advocated for continued operation of the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
“The laws that govern and direct how our national forests are managed are made and implemented in D.C., and so it’s really important that these agencies have a D.C. presence because this is where the policymakers, the lawmakers really spend their time,” Hicks said.
Logistical steps in the reorganization process are still unclear, and no official timeline for the changes has been announced. The press release estimates that the full transition to a state-based model will take about a year to implement and that the agency would provide guidance to employees and partners “as different milestones approach.” In a letter, Trump-appointed Forest Service Chief and former timber executive Tom Schulz assured employees that relocation would be an option for those working at offices impacted by the restructuring. In his letter, Schulz also reiterated the Forest Service’s commitment to fire-readiness and response, stating that the plan will not affect Fire and Aviation Management programs or operational firefighters’ roles.
Wildfire suppression remains a central aim of the Forest Service. But research suggests that well-informed active management of lands—a “hands-on,” stewardship-focused approach employing tools like prescribed fire, tree planting and thinning of overly-dense vegetation with the aim of generating beneficial change on the landscape—could also play an important role in reducing the severity and damage caused by destructive fires. Seattle’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory, one of the Washington facilities proposed for closure, specializes in studying the impacts of fire on human health, wildlife habitat and ecosystem function and contributes to a knowledge base that informs fire management objectives.
Effective, sustainable land management is a challenging prospect without reliable scientific data to guide policy. For many, ambiguity on the part of decision-makers raises questions about the agency’s ability to provide quality data on critical issues affecting public lands as research facilities shift locations and priorities. Officials maintain that research contributions are integral to the mission of the Forest Service and that centralized oversight will ensure that scientists can continue this essential work.
Alissa Cordner, a sociology professor at Whitman who studies firefighter occupational health and wildfire response and has collaborated with Forest Service researchers, addressed the uncertainty surrounding the agency’s plans moving forward.
“The reorganization proposes closing most research facilities and centralizing research under a smaller number of locations,” Cordner wrote in an email to The Wire. “However, implementation isn’t clear. Facilities, projects and people are three different things, and there isn’t public information on what happens to projects and people at facilities that are proposed for closure.”
“One concern is that the USFS sponsors many long-term research projects that have great value in terms of monitoring and understanding trends over time,” she added. ”If those projects get shut down, that’s potentially a huge loss to resource management and risk mitigation.”
With wildfire season in the West on the horizon, no one can be sure how implementation of the restructuring could impact agency response. What is certain is that officials leave many questions unanswered, heightening tensions about the future of the Forest Service. Only time will tell what comes next for this iconic institution.
