Photo Service photo by Deborah Lee Soltesz.
The Trump Administration is proposing relocating the headquarters of the U.S. Forest Service thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C.
In late March, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the administration’s “sweeping restructure” of the agency. As part of that restructure, the administration intended to move the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., where it has been located for more than a century, to Salt Lake City.
Why does this matter? It matters because the Forest Service is quietly one of the most consequential agencies in the federal government. It manages 193 million acres of national forests across 40 states and Puerto Rico. Not only do those national forests include thousands of miles of trails, camping facilities, and visitor centers enjoyed by millions of Americans every year, they’re home to most of the last remaining old growth groves in the country.
Donald Trump and Brooke Rollins are trying to take an axe to the Forest Service’s structure, and their replacement isn’t fit for purpose. In 2025, they proposed consolidating the agency’s existing regional structure into five new field offices. A few months later, they announced an entirely different proposal.
If possible, their new plan is even worse. It seeks to abandon the agency’s regional structure and replace it with state-based leadership offices with no guarantee of greater efficiency or flexibility. They also want to drastically cut the Forest Service’s research arm, eliminating science positions that are tied to regions and shuttering 57 research labs. Good forest stewardship requires good science, and the impacts of this could be particularly severe.
It’s clear this reorganization is less about making the agency nimble and responsive and more about ending the Forest Service as we know it. From the moment they came into office, the Trump Administration focused on dismantling federal agencies, including the Forest Service. DOGE chaotically laid off thousands of Forest Service workers, Trump’s budgets have slashed funding for the agency, and USDA is now on to their second proposal for restructuring the Forest Service.
This is a playbook we’ve seen before. When Trump tried to move the Bureau of Land Management thousands of miles away, all it achieved was disruption. Experienced staff quit, the workforce was hollowed out, expertise was lost, and our public lands suffered. The same fate could come for our national forests. And this couldn’t come at a worse time. Threats to our national forests, from industrial logging to wildfire, have never been greater. Trump’s response is to boost logging quotas and repeal environmental protections, while firing wildland firefighters and scientists. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Our national forests contain many of the wildest spots left on the map in the United States. These are the heart of our shared public lands. The Forest Service should be structured in a way that allows them to steward these treasured places effectively and with robust public engagement. We need a strong Forest Service, guided by science, and with public input at the heart of its decisionmaking. Don’t believe the rhetoric about a simple ‘restructure’ of the Forest Service: Donald Trump is threatening to throw it into the dustbin of history.