U.S. Forest Service to abandon nine regional offices

The U.S. Forest Service will abandon its nine regional offices as its parent Department of Agriculture consolidates out of Washington, D.C., according to a memo released on Thursday by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

“President Trump was elected to make real change in Washington, and we are doing just that by moving our key services outside the beltway and into great American cities across the country,” Rollins said in a statement announcing the reorganization. “We will do so through a transparent and common-sense process that preserves USDA’s critical health and public safety services the American public relies on. We will do right by the great American people who we serve and with respect to the thousands of hardworking USDA employees who so nobly serve their country.”

The reorganization plan left many Forest Service experts wondering what the benefit would be, including former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, who served during the George W. Bush administration.

“I heard rumors a couple months ago of consideration of dropping to three regional offices from nine,” Bosworth told Mountain Journal. “But I hadn’t heard of doing away with regional offices completely. We’ve got 120-some national forests and administrative units. Do you want all those people reporting to the chief?”

USDA employs roughly 100,000 employees who serve in 29 agencies, including the approximately 30,000 employees of the Forest Service as of 2024. The overall Agriculture Department intends to keep no more than 2,000 of its present 4,600 headquarters staff in the Capitol area. Five regional hubs would absorb the subagency duties. They would be in Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah. 

“The Forest Service will phase out the nine Regional Offices over the next year,” the memo states. Those Forest Service regional offices are separate from the larger USDA regional hubs.

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired about 3,400 Forest Service employees who were on probationary status or in departments deemed related to “diversity, equity and inclusion” or other tasks considered unaligned with the Trump administration.

The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of public land, historically divided into nine regions. Each regional leader, or forester, oversees numerous national forests, headed by forest supervisors. Below them are district ranger offices. In Forest Service tradition, those district rangers have considerable local autonomy.

The memo acknowledged that 15,365 USDA workers had “voluntarily elected deferred resignation as of July 24. But it is contradictory about its staffing objectives. Its first “key pillar” was aligning its workforce with financial resources and priorities. Then it stated: “As part of this reorganization, USDA is not conducting a large-scale workforce reduction. To make certain USDA can afford its workforce, this reorganization is another step of the Department’s process of reducing its workforce.” 

The national Forest Service Fire Sciences Lab and Forest Products Lab, located in Missoula, would not be moved, according to the memo. However, seven other stand-alone research stations would be consolidated to Fort Collins.

Retired University of Montana Forestry School Dean Jim Burchfield said those research stations have deep connections to nearby universities, which provide both scientific collaboration and new recruits for forest management tasks. Breaking that connection, he said, “didn’t pass the slap-on-the-head validity test.”

“There’s always opportunity to improve efficiencies and bureaucracies, but that happens over thorough examination of what your goals are,” Burchfield told Mountain Journal. “If the goals are to manage forests well and create a new cadre of managers and scientists, you don’t throw away what’s been working reasonably well.”

Calls for comment to the Forest Service Region 1 office in Missoula were not returned on Thursday.

The USDA memo notes pledges that “reductions and impacts to wildland firefighting … will be minimized” during the reorganization process.

“[W]e are at the height of fire season, and to date, have not only exceeded hiring goals, but have preserved the ability to continue to hire,” a USDA press release added on Thursday.

That claim has been challenged by firefighters in the field as well as agency watchdogs, who counter that the Forest Service has lost significant numbers of its firefighting force. In June, current Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz acknowledged he was trying to rehire about 1,400 workers with red cards that qualify them for firefighting duty.

“The staffing is less now in the Forest Service than it was back in the ’60s,” Bosworth said. “Look at how many people go to national forests for recreation. The whole fire thing is so much different than when I was a firefighter in the ‘60s. I don’t see how this is going to make it better.”