The Sky Is Not Falling On The Forest Service

No, the USFS restructure does not mean a logging free-for-all

News broke last night that the administration is planning an agency-wide restructuring of the Forest Service that will include relocating its headquarters from Washington D.C. to Salt Lake City, replacing its regional office system with a state-based one, and consolidating its 56 research and development facilities into 20. Fascist goons claim this is some sort of effort to move USFS closer to the forests it manages. Opponents claim this is the end of USFS as we know it. Neither claim is true, here’s why.

What’s Happening?

The plan is to relocate 270 USFS staff to a new “headquarters” in SLC, while 130 will remain in DC. While the office of the Chief will be one of those relocated to Utah, it’s not clear how the divide will come down for the remaining teams.

The restructuring will also bring an end to the regional organization of USFS operations. The nine USFS regions will be replaced by 15 state offices and regional leadership will be replaced by statewide offices.

Management of research facilities will transition to a central office in Fort Collins, Colorado, and consolidation will reduce the total number of facilities by more than half.

USFS claims that none of these changes will impact fire management programs or relocate operational firefighting staff.

Has Anything Like This Happened Before?

“This is about building a Forest Service that is nimble, efficient, effective and closer to the forests and communities it serves,” claims Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who has no experience at the Forest Service.

During the first Trump administration, the Bureau of Land Management was temporarily relocated from its Washington D.C. headquarters to an office building in Grand Junction, Colorado shared with Exxon, amid similar claims of moving agency leaders closer to the lands they manage.

But rather than that occurring, the attempt to relocate the BLM instead caused mass resignations of career officials, while operations devolved into chaos as the inexperienced political stooges tasked with running the agency instead embroiled it in scandal.

By the time the Biden administration entered office, only three staff had actually begun working in Grand Junction, and that office was quickly re-designated a regional “hub”, and the headquarters returned to Washington D.C., as a competent Secretary of the Interior and an experienced BLM Director (Tracy Stone-Manning) set about rebuilding the agency.

And while much harm was attempted during BLM’s time in the wilderness, ultimately it ended with the same number of total acres under agency management, with most physical damage being assessed as temporary.

That doesn’t mean longterm harm did not occur. Hundreds of career staff left during that time, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, and the ability for the agency to operate efficiently. Stone-Manning was left spending much of her tenure in an attempt to rebuild the BLM, rather than use it to progress the benefit to the American people it’s supposed to provide.

Why Are People So Worked Up?

Last year, when it looked like Mike Lee and Steve Daines were going to succeed in their effort to sell off 3.3 million acres of BLM and USFS land, while authorizing the future sale of much more, that story broke through to normal Americans who don’t spend all their time obsessing over public land management policy, resulting in record attention for the publications who talk about this stuff, and the non-profits who use it to fundraise. That 15 minutes of fame has been hard to replicate, and outlets have taken away the wrong lesson from it—fear sells—rather than simply accepting that the vast majority of Americans care about public lands, but don’t particularly care about the inner workings of them.

This is the same reason there is still so much disinformation about nothingburgers like the Roadless Rule recision. And as I argued last fall, putting out false information and generally making much ado about nothing actually works against our side’s efforts to advocate for better management of public lands.

That’s not to say there won’t be harm done here. As we saw with the BLM relocation, many career officials will likely be unwilling to uproot their families from a market with good schools and a high standard of living to a city founded by religious extremists that’s already visibly experiencing the impacts of climate change in the form of arsenic-laden air pollution. At least if the cognitive impairments evident in “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” can be considered a barometer of such.

That loss of institutional knowledge will come on top of the 3,400 USFS staff—10 percent of its total workforce—who were RIF’d by DOGE a year ago. The change from regional to state offices is likely another attempt to force out even more career employees by restructuring their jobs in such a way that these changes circumvent any protections they might otherwise have.

But it’s been inevitable ever since Trump got re-elected that something like this would happen. And this has been acknowledged inside USFS.

Writing to all staff in his retirement letter last February, former USFS Chief Randy Moore, a 44-year veteran of the service, made it plain: “The federal government is undergoing a significant transformation,” Moore explained. “How agencies are structured, staffed, and operate is shifting, and the Forest Service is not exempt from these changes.”

“As part of a broader effort to reduce the size of the federal government, we parted ways with colleagues we worked alongside who successfully contributed to our mission, and who were valued members of our Forest Service team,” he continued. “The workforce will continue to be unsettled for a while.”

So What About The Logging?!

Under the Trump administration and as mandated in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the USFS sure is selling a lot of logging permits. But the issue that a lot of the fear mongers miss is that in addition to being evil, these assholes are also incompetent.

Expanding logging operations requires three major prerequisites: roads, lumber mills, and legal permitting.

Road construction through national forests must be funded by taxpayers under current law. But, Agriculture Secretary Rollins has only allocated $50 million for new road construction over the next five years. A mile of road in a national forest costs anywhere from $10,000 on the low end, to over $600,000 in a challenging landscape like Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. And that’s before any bridges or erosion mitigation work come into play. That budget is nowhere near enough money to open up significant new areas to logging.

Beginning in the 1940s, our country slowly shifted away from relying on natural forests for the majority of its timber supply, and towards “tree farming.” Compared to wild forests, farmed lumber is engineered to grow straighter and more uniform. It’s also less dense and softer than the natural alternative. And that means mills built to process farmed lumber typically cannot process the natural alternative, are no longer located near natural sources, and operate at lower costs. 89 percent of the timber we produce in this country now comes from private tree farms, not public lands. We no longer have the industrial infrastructure necessary to support massively expanded logging.

In order to log a slice of public land, a private operator must operate using a permit written by the relevant management agency (the BLM also sees significant logging operations on lands it manages). Those permits can only be issued according to a management plan. But Republicans in Congress have just irrevocably broken that planning and permitting process so badly that it’s going to take years upon years of legal action to figure out a way forward.

This is where we can start talking about the ways in which this USFS restructuring is related to current events.

Beginning last October, now-retiring Senator Steve Daines (R-Good Riddance) began the process of using the Congressional Review Act to disapprove of Resource Management Plans issued on BLM land where he wanted to see expanded energy extraction. What Daines does not appear to understand is that while invoking the CRA allows him to avoid the Filibuster and pass such measures with only the Republican majority voting in favor, it also shifts those RMPs from being a normal agency function into being legally considered a “rule,” which must be approved by Congress. And since none of them have been approved by Congress, that renders all of them, and every permit written based on them, invalid.

This is where the stakes get higher.

While doing that for BLM RMPs might also render the USFS’s Land Management Plans legally invalid (a judge will have to rule on this), there is a vote pending in front of the Senate to definitively render those LMPs invalid: the one that will permit that copper mine to be constructed in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters, which will then destroy the nation’s most popular Wilderness area with sulfuric acid.

The Senate has until the end of April to hold that vote, or the measure disappears. If they vote to move ahead, the Boundary Waters will be destroyed, but the entire permitting process for USFS will also be definitively broken. If it doesn’t occur, or if the vote fails, the Boundary Waters will be saved, but the USFS may be able to proceed with issuing permits.

In both scenarios, America will get at least a small victory. Meanwhile, either way that unfolds, the tree haters lose. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is some small shred of positive news in that.

The other big prerequisite for new logging operations is private investment. And right now, the war in Iran is combining with Trump’s moronic tariffs to increase both the cost of borrowing money and the operational costs of any large project, while creating uncertainty both for financial markets and the wider economy.

How much demand for construction materials will there be over the next few years? How much will producing those materials cost? And what return can investments and borrowing be predicated on? No one can answer those questions right now. Everyone sees trends moving in negative directions.

So, is the administration trying to make it easier to log America’s forests? Sure. But at the same time, it’s taking a lot more steps to make doing that much harder. The fact that we have to deal with an attempt to destroy our democracy is scary, I am not trying to minimize that. But the very thing that might save our country and our forests is the fact that this attempt at a fascist takeover is also desperately stupid.

Top photo: USFS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.