US Forest Service to move headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City | Trump administration
The Trump administration will move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and close regional offices, the agriculture department announced. The announcement sets in motion a controversial restructuring of the nation’s second-largest federal land management agency that Trump officials have been planning since last year.
The move, which the USDA praised as a “common-sense approach,” is reminiscent of the chaotic attempt by the first Trump administration to move the Bureau of Land Management from Washington, D.C., to Colorado in 2019. The Order almost lost 90% of staff based in Washingtonwho refused to move — only for BLM to return to Washington after Joe Biden took office.
Agriculture department officials described the move as a way to bring the USFS administration, which manages about 200 million acres of federal land, closer to its holdings concentrated in western states. Under the new “state-based model,” the agency will be run by 15 directors who oversee one or more states, rather than the current structure based on regions.
“This is about building a Forest Service that is agile, efficient, effective, and closer to the forests and communities it serves,” USFS chief Tom Schultz wrote in a statement. “Effective management and active management are achieved where forests and communities are located, not just at the desk in the capital.”
About 90% of the USFS workforce He is currently working out of the capital, according to the Mountain Journal news outlet.
Environmentalists see the plan as the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken to weaken public land agencies.
“This administration’s plan to dismantle a 120-year-old agency will mean less access to the public forests people rely on, reducing the ability to deforestation.” [the] Intensified wildfire risk and greater threats to clean air, clean water and wildlife habitat,” said Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns at the Wilderness Society.
“Simply put, this restructuring will undermine Forest Service management and organization and fuel the unpopular narrative of officials like Senator Mike Lee that public lands should be sold to the private sector.”
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center on Western Priorities, wrote in a message to the Guardian that reorganizing the USFS is “part of the Trump administration’s attack on science and the scientists America relies on for healthy public lands.” “It may take a generation to regain the ecological and institutional knowledge that will be lost by the closure of research stations across the country.”
Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox welcomed the decision and said the agency would be relocated. workforce is exhausted Cuts made by Elon Musk’s “government efficiency department” will bring jobs to the government.
“With nearly 90% of the Forest Service located west of the Mississippi, moving the U.S. Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City will bring leadership closer to the lands, communities and challenges they manage,” Cox said. wrote on social media. “This also means hundreds of jobs coming to Utah and better, faster decisions on the ground for the people who rely on our public lands, from ranchers and timber producers to the families who work and reproduce there.”
USFS will also consolidate research facilities across the country into a single facility located in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Colorado governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, applauded the relocation.
“More than one-third of Colorado is federal land, which includes world-class ski areas like Vail and Breckenridge, and having closer relationships with our federal partners is important to protecting these lands and the communities around them,” Polis said.
