What the reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service will mean for the Pacific Northwest

The Trump administration announced a massive reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service last week. The agency’s headquarters will move from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, and its regional offices will be replaced by 15 state-based offices. Additionally, more than 50 research stations will close across 31 states, including one in Oregon and two in Washington.

Christine Peterson is a freelance reporter covering wildlife, the environment and outdoor recreation. She wrote about the reorganization for High Country News and joins us with more details.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Trump administration announced a massive reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service last week. The agency’s headquarters will move from Washington D.C. to Salt Lake City. Its regional offices will be replaced by 15 state-based offices, and more than 50 research stations will close, including one in Oregon and two in Washington. Christine Peterson is a freelance reporter covering wildlife, the environment, and outdoor recreation. She wrote about this for High Country News, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Christine Peterson: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: Can you first just remind us what the U.S. Forest Service actually does?

Peterson: The Forest Service oversees the nation’s 154 national forests, so they manage most of the public forested land, which is primarily in the west. They also do a tremendous amount of research, a lot of obviously firefighting and work on the ground.

Miller: So the managing of those national forests that has been done by nine regional offices, that will end under this reorganization. They’ll be replaced by either state-specific offices in places like Oregon and Washington, Idaho, or offices that lump neighboring states together like Colorado and Kansas. What did you hear about the practical difference that this part of the reorganization would make?

Peterson: It is a little complicated and too early to say for sure. Some of the concerns were that the more that you eliminate these larger regional structures and have more communication just straight from the national office to the states, that then that can start to muddy messages to some degree and can start giving maybe states more control over forests in ways that may or may not align with the multiple use mandate.

So being able to use forest for recreation and also logging and timber and a number of these other uses. I think that the concern is that under the regional structure there was in some ways this middle wall or middle filter to some degree that helped communicate a national message down to the forest level. And so with a state structure, I think people are struggling to know exactly what that’s going to do and how that’ll change management on the ground.

Miller: What did you hear about the closure of these 50-plus research facilities?

Peterson: Yeah, I mean a number of them are leadership offices, are facilities that had, so one in Portland has a lot of leadership in it. There will still be labs, a number of research labs that will be open, but the Trump administration says this is an effort to consolidate leadership. All the high level folks, or a lot of the high level folks will be moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, where the main research center will be. And the concern on the ground is that’s going to make a lot of research a lot harder to do and is actually going to take away, instead of moving the forest to the people, which has been some of the argument for doing this restructure, moving the headquarters to Salt Lake, that this is actually going to move research away from the people and away from forests and so there will be potentially less research done, less impactful research done by getting rid of a lot of these offices.

Miller: There’s also the headquarter’s move from D.C. to Salt Lake City. Given that most of the national forest land is in the west, I can imagine the arguments in favor of this move, and I guess you just gave us a version, but the short version, moving the people to the forest, but what did you hear about the benefits of keeping agency leaders in the nation’s capital?

Peterson: There were a number of benefits that people have talked about, and one is that the leadership of an agency like this isn’t really supposed to be in and among the people, that they’re the ones that are supposed to be working with lawmakers, working with Congress, working with the White House to help set national priorities, and then those trickle down to what were regional offices and then local forests.

And so the beauty of having, or at least according to folks I talked to, the beauty of having all of these high level folks all in D.C. is that then for farmers, ranchers, tribal members, industry folks, recreationists, you buy a plane ticket, you go to DC, you talk to everybody you need to talk to. You can hit all the agencies, you can talk to your lawmakers. And that this is going to make it a lot harder for people to get a hold of the higher level executives that they need to talk to because now it’s, well, now we have to make a trip to Salt Lake in addition to still needing to go to D.C. to talk to my congressperson.

Miller: Will any of the changes you’re talking about impact wildfire response or preparedness?

Peterson: I mean, right now, the Forest Service said on a big staff call last week that they’re not going to be changing any force or any firefighting personnel, so that’s what we know right now, that it’s not going to make changes to fire and aviation management programs or field-based operational firefighters. I think that the concern is if there are a bunch of resignations, which when you ask people to move, a lot of times you end up with a lot of resignations because people don’t want to move. They don’t want to move their families. And so then with that you lose a lot of the support staff and a lot of Forest Service personnel who have their red cards who are certified to show up in a bad fire season. What we’re hearing right now is that at least on the surface they are not making changes to fire personnel.

Miller: What has the Trump administration put forward as its reasons for this major reorganization?

Peterson: There’s a lot of talk of efficiency and streamlining. That would be the argument for the research station that they can get rid of a lot of overlap or a lot of redundancies. And then the other big argument is, as we talked about this, this moving forest closer to the states and to the people who live there and manage them. And I think there there has been a big movement in this administration, though it though it went prior to this administration too, for the Forest Service to be working more with some states in forests in like shared stewardship agreements is what some of them are called, where then the Forest Service might still have the ultimate say over a logging project or a series of prescribed burns, but the state would have more of a say in it, maybe more of a seat at the table. And so then the argument for this is that we’re going to streamline things and we’re going to really focus on these presidential priorities, which are largely timber harvest and mining energy.

Miller: The administration did a similar reorganization of the Bureau of Land Management during Trump’s first term. How did that end up going?

Peterson: Not great. They moved the headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, which is a little different. Grand Junction was a four hour drive or so away from a major airport. Salt Lake City at least has a major airport there, but they asked a couple 1,000 people to move west, and ultimately about, I think it was 47, a few dozen people ended up actually moving. And the Western Headquarters, as it’s called, still exists, but most people said, I’m sorry, I can’t. Because a lot of federal employees, just like most of us have spouses and kids and families and things that you do and houses, and moving’s hard. And so a lot of people just said I’m not going to do that. And the BLM lost a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge.

Miller: Unless I’m wrong, one big difference between this time and four plus years ago, in Trump 1 – or I guess, sorry, it’s eight years ago – it was that this time this change is coming on the heels of a massive loss of of swaths of the federal workforce, including the Forest Service. So how could this move compound the loss of institutional knowledge that’s already happened?

Peterson: I think that’s exactly what worries people a lot is that there is already this really big sense of chaos and overwhelm in the agency from losing thousands of employees. The Forest Service lost 5, 6,000 people over the course of the last year, and now this will likely lead to more. There was a sense from some folks that I heard from that at least now the announcement is out and at least people can start trying to think about what their future could be. This had been hanging over, I think, hanging over a lot of folks’ heads for a long time, wondering what it was going to look like and what their futures were. But yeah, the main takeaway from everyone I talked to is things aren’t running great now and they’re really not going to run better as this next level of sort of confusion unfolds.

Miller: What is the timeline here? When can we expect these changes to really take effect?

Peterson: I don’t have a great answer for you on that other than it’s starting soon, now. I think that it is underway and how long all of it takes is probably going to depend on a number of things including who’s willing to move and how long it takes them.

Miller: Christine, thanks very much.

Peterson: Thank you.

Miller: Christine Peterson is a freelance reporter who covers wildlife, the environment, and outdoor recreation. She wrote a recent article for High Country News about the Trump administration’s plans to massively reorganize the U.S. Forest Service.

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