Last week, the Trump Administration continued its assault on federal research and scientists by gutting the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service and its research and development (R&D) offices. In addition to the very important firefighting capabilities at the Forest Service, agency scientists also provide a critical line of defense for our nearly 200 million acres of national forests and grasslands through scientific understanding of the complex nature of climate change and its role in longer, more intense wildfire seasons and increased insect and disease outbreaks.
The expansive restructuring of the agency, which includes moving headquarters to Utah and spreading staff to the winds is irreversibly destructive to the federal scientific enterprise and leaves the nation to face growing climate threats with fewer experts predicting and managing wildfires. It also leaves us less equipped to protect forests that provide clean air and water and less able to support many rural livelihoods. More importantly, the reshuffling of Forest Service staff poses an imminent threat as hotter, drier conditions across much of the country are setting up dangerous wildfire risks in the coming months.
Nobody wants this
My own experience as a civil servant at USDA working directly with Forest Service R&D scientists tells me this relocation is bad for the American people, bad for American producers and foresters, and bad for rural communities. Not only is the agency’s headquarters moving to Salt Lake City, but the Forest Service will shutter 57 of 77 research facilities located in 31 states. Many R&D staff will likely be consolidated into a centralized office in Fort Collins, Colorado.
The Forest Service’s mission in administering over 193 million acres of land—including 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands—is to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.” Through its R&D arm, the Forest Service conducts independent science it makes available to the public that also provides the foundation for many forest management decisions. The agency has done all this on a budget that equates to roughly 0.6% of the president’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget for national defense spending. At about $9 billion, the entire Forest Service budget would pay for 18 days of fighting the war against Iran (assuming $500 million cost per day).
As National Coordinator for the USDA Climate Hubs program, I worked hand-in-hand with many Forest Service R&D scientists, the very same ones who are being uprooted from their research stations. I also fondly remember meeting Smokey Bear for the first time at the San Bernardino National Forest while learning about their wildfire control strategies and research. Seeing the news about the relocation and reorganization made me very sad for my Forest Service colleagues, knowing that the next few years will require many to leave the agency, move states, and/or switch careers completely. Truly devastating.
Forest Service R&D scientists were essential to bringing their perspectives on climate-related impacts and adaptation on forestlands, including their interplay with agriculture. For example, the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station collaborated with regional geneticists to build the Seedlot Selection Tool, which helps forest managers match planting materials based on current and future climates.
Another important resource that may no longer be updated, or may be lost, is the Fire Management Adaptation Menu, produced by the USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub and Forest Service Northern Research Station. Losing this critical information would take away tools that help land managers anticipate climate change impacts and identify steps they can take to adapt forests to changing fire regimes.
So what’s the big deal if researchers are moved around? The More than Just Parks Substack explains the impact well:
“You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”
I also share the sentiment expressed by Robert Bonnie, former USDA undersecretary during both the Obama and Biden Administrations, and who helped oversee the Forest Service during the Obama Administration: “Nobody is asking for this. None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody.”
Compromising US wildfire research
By its own account, Forest Service R&D is the “world’s leading wildland fire research organization.” This work includes how climate change alters fuel moisture and fire behavior through warmer and drier conditions. And the science is clear—the wildfires burning now aren’t the same fires that burned 30 years ago. They are burning at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, growing with greater speed, and under more extreme fire weather conditions.
These longer, more intense wildfire seasons are destroying homes, livelihoods, and lives. In addition, costly wildfire seasons are driving up property insurance premiums and contributing to rising housing affordability challenges, according to UCS Senior Policy Director for Climate and Energy Rachel Cleetus. As my colleague succinctly put it, “Without robust science, staffing, expertise, and resources, as well as fair pay for wildland firefighters, the job of tackling worsening wildfire seasons will be much harder—and that could put people in greater danger.”
The scale of disruption across R&D sites will yield a significant brain drain and push scientific discovery back decades, especially on issues relevant to the Forest Service: wildfires, pests, post-fire restoration, and more.
Threat to forests as a land carbon sink
Among other concerns, the Trump Administration’s restructuring is a threat to forests’ role as a land carbon sink, and management choices under different climate futures affect long-term carbon outcomes. Globally, forests have historically absorbed roughly one-third of human heat-trapping emissions, but climate change is threatening that carbon sequestration capacity. Canada’s forests are already a source of carbon to the atmosphere following record-breaking wildfire seasons and devastating insect outbreaks.
In the US, the future of our land carbon sink remains murky, with climate change playing a key role in forests’ trajectories. Wildfires threaten to release huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere and zero-out a forest’s capacity to absorb carbon for years, while drought can lead to tree mortality and facilitate insect outbreaks.
Critical research on these dynamics comes from Forest Service researchers and relies on the agency’s long-term monitoring programs that expand our understanding about how forests respond to climate change. Loss of that scientific and forest management capacity threaten not only our immediate ability to respond to climate-fueled wildfires, but also our ability to use forests to adapt to and mitigate climate change.
Cutting science agencies benefits no one
It’s worth noting that similar moves by the Trump administration to relocate the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Headquarters yielded negative results and decimated those agencies. Relocation of federal agencies outside of Washington, DC to be closer to stakeholders was a tactic by the first Trump Administration to diminish the use of science, data, and evidence in decision making. In 2019, the USDA’s ERS and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) were moved to Kansas City for oft-used reasons like “cost savings,” to “provide better customer service,” and “better attract and retain staff.”
Likewise, the BLM, a major federal land management agency and partner to the Forest Service, had its headquarters moved “out West” to Grand Junction. Already, 97% of BLM staff were located in the western United States. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), nearly half of the relocated staff declined reassignment, and the agency’s reorganization efforts did not yield effective reforms.
Having worked at BLM headquarters in 2024, I can share my personal observation that the agency was still hamstrung from the 2019 relocation with decreased staffing, missing expertise, and loss of institutional knowledge.
I see a parallel here with Forest Service headquarters being moved to Salt Lake City. It will disrupt key services and important research, accelerating the demise of its world-class research. After seeing what happened at BLM, ERS, and NIFA, the Forest Service will be crippled at coordinating issues across states and less visible in important policy conversations with other land management agencies.
The disastrous effects of President Trump’s recent push to deregulate industry have been most visible in the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) chaos. The now largely defunct department’s haphazard cuts, combined with budget proposals to slash funding and staffing for dozens of federal agencies, make the sole purpose of these moves clear: the destruction of competency, experience, and effectiveness at federal agencies. The administration is not seeking efficiencies or savings, rather they are seeking a more expansive, more profitable path for special interests through the exploitation of public goods like our national forests. Industry only profits from horizontal trees, not vertical ones.
If the Trump Administration were to move forward with this restructuring as planned, Forest Service R&D would join research efforts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as casualties of this administration’s deliberate, dangerous subterfuge.
The dismantling of the Forest Service is another example in a long list of the Trump Administration’s assault on science. The Administration has already begun dismantling our world-class earth system science research and modeling center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a public good that, if broken up, would have serious economic, national security, and public safety harms, including wildfire research and—consequently—preparedness and response to wildfires. And like last year, the Trump administration has asked Congress to essentially defund NOAA’s research arm.
As Smokey Bear has taught millions, only YOU can prevent forest fires. In this case, only YOU really can prevent literal forest fires by fighting the Trump Administration’s plan to dismantle the Forest Service and ensuring that critical science on wildfires, climate, and carbon continues.
Even with the media attention around this disruptive and corrupt move, one should ask themself—not if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound—but if the Trump Administration breaks apart the Forest Service and no one is around to stop it, does it survive?